Tag Archives: Ayn Rand

Will and want

It is all too easy to choose mediocrity through passivity, to drown in a sea of honey, thick and viscous. A slow death. I have to be laser clear and impermeable. I have to be solid enough to let it roll off my flanks, to not be softened into uselessness. I don’t expect you to listen or anyone to listen unless I make it worth their while. I want to give people something, more than something for their efforts. A squalling child, a blind arrogant brute all want to be felt, heard by virtue of their want. Why don’t you care? Why won’t you listen? I don’t want pity or to trade in obligation. I want to be good.

- Hayley Bracken

Altruism

One of the grimmest monuments to altruism is man’s culturally induced selflessness: his willingness to live with himself as with the unknown, to ignore, evade, repress the personal (the non-social) needs of his soul, to know least about the things that matter most, and thus to consign his deepest values to the impotent underground of subjectivity and his life to the dreary wasteland of chronic guilt.

- Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto