Peikoff Course 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. Christians rejected the need for proof to support belief in God, yet dismissed proof altogether when it was there.

Kira Peikoff

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. I am sure that the mistakes of that time will not be repeated; we should probably make another set of mistakes.

Winston Churchill

#6. Principles make it simple.

Leonard Peikoff

#7. Spending your days doing work that you find rewarding, intellectually challenging and fun will do more than all the spa vacations in the world to keep your spirits high and your heart engaged.

Robin S. Sharma

#8. Talent is really important in politics, but experience is also really important.

Nicola Sturgeon

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

Leonard Peikoff

#10. In a long life there are thirty or thirty-five thousand days to be got through, but only a few dozen that really matter, Big Days when Something Momentous Happens. The rest - the vast majority, tens of thousands of days - are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous.

William Landay

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

Leonard Peikoff

#12. 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

#13. To irrational principles, one cannot be loyal. Ideas that are not derived from reality cannot be consistently practiced in reality.
as quoted by Leonard Peikoff in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand

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

Leonard Peikoff

#15. 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

#16. The Lord shall have made his American Israel high above all nations which he hath made.

Ezra Stiles

#17. 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

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

Leonard Peikoff

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

Leonard Peikoff

#20. Normally I laugh at such things, because there is nothing like a fart to lighten up a tense situation.

Kevin Hearne

#21. Of course, as always, there is an arbitrary, invisible fence in place. You can't see it, but it will always keep you out. It will always encircle happiness and keep you out.

Leila Sales

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

Leonard Peikoff

#23. 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

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

Leonard Peikoff

#25. A shore town without a boardwalk is like an ice-cream cone without sprinkles.

Cathy Newman

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

Leonard Peikoff