Ayn Rand Quotes About Culture

• A culture is made — or destroyed — by its articulate voices.

  Ayn Rand

  Voice, Culture, Made

  Ayn Rand (1990). “The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought”, p.175, Penguin

• The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

  Ayn Rand

  Character, Winning, Thug

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.53, Penguin

• Aquinas brought an Aristotelian view of reason back into European culture, and lighted the way toward the Renaissance.

  Ayn Rand

  Views, Culture, Renaissance

• Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.

  Ayn Rand

  Western Culture, Needs, Code Of Ethics

  Ayn Rand (1999). “Ayn Rand Reader”, p.413, Penguin

• Professional intellectuals are the voice of a culture and are, therefore, its leaders, its integrators and its bodyguards.

  Ayn Rand

  Leadership, Voice, Culture

  Ayn Rand (1963). “For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (50th Anniversary Edition)”, p.8, Penguin

• A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

  Ayn Rand

  Men, Intellectual, Culture

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.130, Penguin

• Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?

  Ayn Rand

  Reading, People, Library

  Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff (1999). “The Journals of Ayn Rand”, p.138, Penguin

• The three of them set out every morning on adventures of their own kind. Once, an elderly professor of literature, Mrs. Taggart's friend, saw them on top of a pile in a junk yard, dismantling the carcass of an automobile. He stopped, shook his head and said to Francisco, 'A young man of your position ought to spend his time in libraries, absorbing the culture of the world.' 'What do you think I'm doing?' asked Francisco.

  Ayn Rand

  Morning, Adventure, Men

  Ayn Rand (2016). “Atlas Shrugged”, p.71, Hamilton Books

• The American businessmen, as a class, have demonstrated the greatest productive genius and the most spectacular achievements ever recorded in the economic history of mankind. What reward did they receive from our culture and its intellectuals? The position of a hated, persecuted minority. The position of a scapegoat for the evils of the bureaucrats.

  Ayn Rand

  Business, Class, Evil

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.74, Penguin

• The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently: they are most helplessly in its power. The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them-from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handful of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default.

  Ayn Rand

  Philosophy, Book, School

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.367, Penguin

• Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements-an d a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

  Ayn Rand

  Men, Intellectual, Deep Thought

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