Category Archives: Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged in Less Than 8 Minutes (Video)

In just 8 minutes, explore the powerful themes and unforgettable characters of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s iconic novel that challenges the role of the individual in society. From the determined Dagny Taggart to the mysterious John Galt, this video breaks down the book’s complex ideas about capitalism, innovation, and the human spirit. Whether you’re new to the novel or revisiting its bold message, this summary is perfect for anyone looking to understand its lasting impact.

Graphic Quotes: Ayn Rand on Free Thought w/Video

“Since men are neither omniscient nor infallible, they must be free to agree or disagree, to cooperate or to pursue their own independent course, each according to his own rational judgment. Freedom is the fundamental requirement of man’s mind.” – Ayn Rand

Complete Classic Movie: Atlas Shrugged Part I (2011)

Stars: Taylor Schilling, Matthew Marsden, Rebecca Wisocky, Navid Negahban, Edi Gathegi. A powerful railroad executive, Dagny Taggart, struggles to keep her business alive while society is crumbling around her. Based on the 1957 novel by Ayn Rand.

Atlas Shrugged: John Galt Speech (raw footage) – Video

“Form your own communities on the frontiers of your crumbling world.”

Pamela Geller: The Coming Civil War

The left has been at war against America for decades. The right represents those of us who favor individual freedom and capitalism — and the left are those who want government controls and socialism.

Political violence became an essential and successful means of leftist warfare in the 60’s, the decade of destruction. The success of the violent “student rebellion” in 1964 and the so-called Free Speech Movement has set the table for the left’s warmongering and treason. It was clear from the outset that the “student revolution” violently ushered in at Berkeley in the mid-sixties would come to this. The left is evil, and they mean to destroy our way of life, our freedom and us. It took decades to norm their anti-Americanism, their hatred of freedom and individual rights, but they have reached their tipping point. And the long beaten and battered among us have had it.

Ayn Rand explained why the left is seeking nothing less than the breakdown of American society:

The attempt to solve social problems by means of physical force is what a civilized society is established to prevent. The advocates of mass civil disobedience admit that their purpose is intimidation. A society that tolerates intimidation as a means of settling disputes—the physical intimidation of some men or groups by others—loses its moral right to exist as a social system, and its collapse does not take long to follow.

Politically, mass civil disobedience is appropriate only as a prelude to civil war—as the declaration of a total break with a country’s political institutions.

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The new age of Ayn Rand: how she won over Trump and Silicon Valley

Her novel The Fountainhead is one of the few works of fiction that Donald Trump likes and she has long been the darling of the US right. But only now do her devotees hold sway around the world.

As they plough through their GCSE revision, UK students planning to take politics A-level in the autumn can comfort themselves with this thought: come September, they will be studying one thinker who does not belong in the dusty archives of ancient political theory but is achingly on trend. For the curriculum includes a new addition: the work of Ayn Rand.

It is a timely decision because Rand, who died in 1982 and was alternately ridiculed and revered throughout her lifetime, is having a moment. Long the poster girl of a particularly hardcore brand of free-market fundamentalism – the advocate of a philosophy she called “the virtue of selfishness” – Rand has always had acolytes in the conservative political classes. The Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, Paul Ryan, is so committed a Randian, he was famous for giving every new member of his staff a copy of Rand’s gargantuan novel, Atlas Shrugged (along with Freidrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom). The story, oft-repeated, that his colleague in the US Senate, Rand Paul, owes his first name to his father Ron’s adulation of Ayn (it rhymes with “mine”) turns out to be apocryphal, but Paul describes himself as a fan all the same.

Not to be left out, Britain’s small-staters have devised their own ways of worshipping at the shrine of Ayn. Communities secretary Sajid Javid reads the courtroom scene in Rand’s The Fountainhead twice a year and has done so throughout his adult life. As a student, he read that bit aloud to the woman who is now his wife, though the exercise proved to be a one-off. As Javid recently confessed to the Spectator, she told him that if he tried that again, he would get dumped. Meanwhile, Daniel Hannan, the Tory MEP many see as the intellectual architect of Brexit, keeps a photograph of Rand on his Brussels desk.

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Who is John Galt?

Lord Monckton asks if freedom-loving tycoons will begin to vanish.

Last year, the Ayn Rand Institute was kind enough to send me a copy of “Atlas Shrugged,” the masterwork of that great prophetess of liberty and of free markets. I read all 1,100 pages in two days. For, although the novel has a powerful political message, and one that America is ignoring at her peril, it is also a gripping thriller, with a love story built in, set amid the inexorable decline of a nation made feeble-minded by socialism.

If you have not read “Atlas Shrugged,”you should. Just Google “Ayn Rand Institute” and order your copy now. Never has its message been more apposite. And, after you have read the book, watch the splendid three-movie series that brings it to life. All three movies can be seen on YouTube.

I shall not spoil the story for you by giving too much of it away. However, it is centered around the character of Dagny Taggart, who, with her inept brother James, has inherited from their father the largest transcontinental railroad in the country.

Dagny, the highly efficient chief operating officer of the railroad, has to try to keep it running as the country’s economic infrastructure crumbles under the heel of incompetent socialism. The decline accelerates as, one by one, the leading industrialists who had struggled to build up their empires and keep America on the move mysteriously disappear. Some of them destroy their mines or oilfields as they go.

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Graphic Quotes: Ayn Rand on Communism and Socialism w/Video

“There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism — by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.” Ayn Rand

Reagan, Thatcher busts defaced at Chapman University

Students at Chapman University in Orange, California awoke Wednesday morning to find statues of various political figures defaced and accused of crimes including “racism,” “homophobia,” and “neo-liberalist ideology.” The defaced busts included Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Albert Schweitzer.

The statues, depicting historical figures such as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Ayn Rand, were also ornamented with posters reading off a list of “charges” for “student review.”

“Ronald Reagan is under student review due to Racism, Classism, and Homophobia,” read the poster underneath the bust of the 40th president.

The vandals also defaced a statue of Margaret Thatcher, filing the same charges against her.

The vandals also accused Christian theologian and medical missionary Albert Schweitzer of “Racism and White Savior Complex.”

Charges of “Global Violence and Imperialism” were brought against free-market economist Milton Friedman while objectivist thinker Ayn Rand was accused of “Gender Roles and Homophobia.”

Campus Reform spoke to the Reddit user who originally uploaded the images of the defaced statues to the TumblrInAction subreddit.

Reaction online was mostly negative.

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Graphic Quotes: Ayn Rand on the Degrees of Evil w/Video

“If there are degrees of evil. it is hard to say who is more contemptible: The Brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others or the moral degenerate who granted to others the right to force others mind.” Ayn Rand

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