I spent a year and a half reading everything I could by and about Ayn Rand.
You cannot form an honest opinion about her philosophy by reading what others say, you have to read what she said.
You can divide people who speak about Ayn Rand into those who dismiss her because they have some vague idea she was anti-charity. Then there are those who marginalize her because she believed in free enterprise. Then there are those who are against her because she was openly atheist in an era when it was dangerous to say so publicly in America. Finally, you have a large group of people who voice contempt for her as a person because she lived an unconventional lifestyle, smoked heavily and could defeat anybody in a debate.
The one thing you can't do is come out against Ayn Rand in any honest way without having taken the trouble to learn what she espoused and how it holds together as a philosophy.
Let's face it, people who have been drowned by a cultic religion need to re-examine their rational thinking process more than almost any other group. I approached Rand's writings for this reason: their claims to be OBJECTIVE. My task was to discover if it was objective and if it were useful to me.
What I discovered was extraordinary! It was entirely helpful. The best part of it was that it was an entirely non-spiritual, non-superstitious system of discovering what we know, can know, and how we can know it. It is logical, reasonable and pragmatic.
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Let me acquaint you with her thinking by means of some handy quotations. Think of it as a buffet or sampler of her mind.
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The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.
Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
It only stands to reason that where there's a sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
Upper classes are a nation's past; the middle class is its future.
Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves - or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.
Do not ever say that the desire to 'do good' by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity is a good motive.
The man who lets his leaders prescribe his course is like a wreck being towed to the scrap heap.
Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason.
God... a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive. God is that which no human mind can know, they say—and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge—God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit, A is non-A, perception is non-sensory, knowledge is non-reason. Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.
Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
What is Virtue? Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.
The economic value of a man’s work is determined, on a free market, by a single principle: by the voluntary consent of those who are willing to trade him their work or products in return. This is the moral meaning of the law of supply and demand.
Emotions are the automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by his subconscious; emotions are estimates of that which furthers man’s values or threatens them, that which is for him or against him.
