The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
Ayn Rand
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Now observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for “harmony with nature”—there is no discussion of man’s needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears.... In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.”
“The thinking child seeks equals; the conformist seeks protectors.”
“There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or “limited”) reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some authority.”
“In the 1960s, college students forcibly occupied administration buildings, demanding courses in “black studies.” Today, every major university features full departments (and even some designated dormitories and cafeterias) for a variety of ethnic excogitations. Today, instead of violent sit-ins, there has been a quiet coup by “diversity committees,” whose authoritarian thought-police reign on campuses and who banish “politically incorrect” dissenters to the dungeons of re-education seminars.”
“If a determined, disciplined gang of statists were to make an assault on the crumbling remnants of a mixed economy, boldly and explicitly proclaiming the collectivist tenets which the country had accepted by tacit default—what resistance would they encounter? The dispirited, demoralized, embittered majority would remain lethargically indifferent to any public event. And many would support the gang, at first, moved by a desperate, incoherent frustration, by a need to protest, not knowing fully against what, by a blind desire to strike out somehow at the suffocating hopelessness of the status quo.”
“A thinking child cannot conform. Thought does not bow to authority.”
“What Columbus felt when he landed in America, what the astronauts felt when they landed on the moon, is what a child feels when he discovers the earth, between the ages of two and seven.”
“But, of course, it is not for their language that the tribalists are fighting: they are fighting to protect their level of awareness, their mental passivity, their obedience to the tribe, and their desire to ignore the existence of outsiders.”
“The notion that one’s culture is superior to all others solely because it represents the traditions of one’s ancestors, is regarded as chauvinism if claimed by a majority—but as “ethnic” pride if claimed by a minority.”
“So the advocacy of “ethnicity,” means racism plus tradition i.e., racism plus conformity i.e., racism plus staleness.”
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Book Keywords:
childhood, control, power, discovery, intelligence, ecology, survival, conformity, manufacturing, submission, nature, productivity
