I had a hard time with Ayn Rand because I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with the first 90% of every sentence, but getting lost at "therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone."
...from the initial outline Ayn Rand provided, a very rich and powerful philosophy emerges — e.g., it solves such problems as science versus free will and moral responsibility, knowledge versus the fact of fallibility. Merely because Rand's ideas were not born in academe or developed in full detail by her, it cannot be concluded that they are unsound.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
I figured it might provide a parable of Ayn Rand's philosophy that I could discuss. For me, that philosophy reduces itself to: "I'm on board; pull up the lifeline."
— Roger Ebert on Part I
Ayn Rand is one of the most widely read philosophers of the twentieth century.... Academics have often dismissed her ideas as "pop" philosophy. As a best-selling novelist, a controversial, flamboyant polemicist, and a woman in a male-dominated profession, Rand remained outside the academy throughout her life. Her works had inspired passionate responses that echo the uncompromising nature of her moral vision. In many cases, her audiences were either cultish in their devotion or savage in their attacks. The left was infuriated by her anticommunist, procapitalist politics, whereas the right was disgusted by her atheism and civil libertarianism.
— Chris Matthew Sciabarra, in Ayn Rand : The Russian Radical (1995) Introduction, p. 1
Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we'd pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we're only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else... that's a pretty narrow vision.
In Ayn Rand's world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions, if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messianic figure rather than a genocidal prick. Which is what he'd be anywhere else.
— John Scalzi
After hijacking all radio channels, John Galt delivered a speech so long, so exhausting, and so boring that the government finally gave in to his demands, allowing all corporations to function however they pleased without any regulations to speak of. Now, decades later, America has become a prosperous country where the rich get richer and everyone else has to suffer the current recession.
One thousand pages of ideological fabulism; I had to flog myself to read it.
— William F. Buckley Jr., about Atlas Shrugged
Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.
—Corey Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin
