A Quote by Ayn Rand

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.

Ayn Rand

Quote Topics

Men Altruism Any Civilization Morality Reject Survive To Survive

Quote Author

Ayn Rand
Russian - Writer
February 2, 1905 - March 6, 1982

The three values which men had held for centuries and which have now collapsed are: mysticism, collectivism, altruism. Mysticism — as a cultural power — died at the time of the Renaissance. Collectivism — as a political ideal — died in World War II. As to altruism — it has never been alive. It is the poison of death in the blood of Western civilization, and men survived it only to the extent to which they neither believed nor practiced it.

Ayn Rand

If we have an element of Americans here that reject western civilization, and that's a big element, that reject western civilization, then what have we? This is an effort on the left I think to break down the American civilization and the American culture and turn it into something entirely different.

Steve King

The Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation: The doctrine of a supreme, intelligent sovereign of the universe, I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.

John Adams

I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality.

Mahatma Gandhi

If we want our civilization to survive, we have to watch for the extremes. We have to reclaim our morality, both individually and as the society. To protect ourselves from extremisms, we have to maintain moderation.

Ali Sina

The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia [was] the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced.

Ayn Rand

Reject labels. Reject identities. Reject conformity. Reject convention. Reject definitions. Reject names.

Ming-Dao Deng

If we wish our civilization to survive we must break with the habit of deference to great men.

Karl Popper

You seem cynical because you're always talking about that selfish behavior that's dressed up as altruism. It doesn't mean there isn't altruism. It just means that it's harder to make jokes about altruism.

Stephen Colbert

A religion such as Judaism or Catholicism might survive even if it comes to reject a literal account of God creating man and animals. But it cannot survive the rejection of an immaterial soul.

Paul Bloom

Some people automatically associate morality and altruism with a religious vision of the world. But I believe it is a mistake to think that morality is an attribute only of religion. We can imagine two types of spirituality: one tied to religion, while the other arises spontaneously in the human heart as an expression of love for our neighbors and a desire to do them good.

Dalai Lama

Civilization is first of all a moral thing. Without truth, respect for duty, love of neighbor, and virtue, everything is destroyed. The morality of a society is alone the basis of civilization.

Henri Frederic Amiel

If we don't change, if the egoic consciousness continues, I don't believe that humanity as a species can survive, or at least human civilization can survive, for another hundred years.

Eckhart Tolle

Whoever desires to live among men has to obey their laws this is what the secular morality of Western civilization comes down to. ... Rationality in the form of such obedience swallows up everything, even the freedom to think.

Max Horkheimer

Man needs knowledge in order to survive, and only reason can achieve it; men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason, can exist only as parasites on the thinking of others.

Ayn Rand

These European White Men, then, with civilization in their blood and in their destiny, crossed the Atlantic and set up a new civilization on a bleak and rock bound coast. It was the White Men who drove north to Alaska and west to California; the men who opened up the tropics and subdued the Arctics; the men who mastered the African Veldts; the men who peopled Australia and seized the gates of the world at Suez, Gibraltar and Panama.

Ben Klassen

A Quote by Ayn Rand

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors