Leonard Peikoff Quotes

#1. Logic, order, truth, reason, we consign them all to the oblivion of death," said one Surrealist manifesto. We must "cultivate the hatred of intelligence," said the leader of the Futurists, Filippo Marinetti, an artist hailed by Mussolini as the John the Baptist of Fascism.17

Leonard Peikoff

#2. To send a child to rot in the prison of Cuba for the alleged sake of his own well-being is criminal hypocrisy.

Leonard Peikoff

#3. The Nazis take the skeleton in the closet of centuries and rattle it boastfully. Force, they declare, will always be necessary, since it is in the nature of human life (which is true, if one accepts their concept of human life).

Leonard Peikoff

#4. Principles make it simple.

Leonard Peikoff

#5. The artist is the closest man comes to being God.

Leonard Peikoff

#6. To save the world is the
simplest thing in the world.
All one has to do is think.

Leonard Peikoff

#7. When you get up in front of a group of people, you make a contract with them; you promise them, "I am going to deliver value X." Every once in a while, you have to say, "See, I remember; I am keeping my promise.

Leonard Peikoff

#8. The man who waits for reality to write the truth inside his soul waits in vain.

Leonard Peikoff

#9. The deepest roots of this modern shift are twofold: in epistemology, the romanticist advocacy of feeling as superior to reason; in ethics, the altruist advocacy of others as superior to self. The result is a view of morality in which the ruling standard is: the feelings of others.

Leonard Peikoff

#10. Socialism" for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism - in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics. "To be a socialist," says Goebbels, "is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole."9

Leonard Peikoff

#11. The worse the coming future, the more it should motivate its opponents.

Leonard Peikoff

#12. The more you learn, if you learn it properly, the more clear you become and the more you know.

Leonard Peikoff

#13. The unphilosophical majority among men are the ones most helplessly dependent on their era's dominant ideas.

Leonard Peikoff

#14. What one needs to know in order to appraise a man morally is not: what did his mother say or do when he was three? The proper question is: what does he say and do now?

Leonard Peikoff

#15. Statism and the advocacy of reason are philosophical opposites. They cannot coexist - neither in a philosophic system nor in a nation.

Leonard Peikoff

#16. Each man must reach his own verdict, by weighing all the relevant evidence.

Leonard Peikoff