Being so out of date, and slanted in view I am astonished such an acclaimed writer successfully published these views to an accepting audience, let alone carry so much weight in academia to date.

Ms Rand’s words hit me differently at 40 than when I had read her at 20. She seemed a fierce individualist at 20, and I am still appreciative of the opportunity for dialogue about ideas that she encourages. While I am not a proponent of all of the ideas she discusses in these essays, there is a fair amount of truth in some of the points she brings up regarding education, and the drift of US culture toward a required altruism that uplifts those less able at the expense at times of the most fortunate. As a liberal myself I appreciate the attempt that Rand makes to talk through the why’s of politics on a fundamental level. The last couple of essays in this book struck me as excellent encouragements for dialogue as a whole.

#سقراطيات
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معظم البشر يقضون أيامهم وهم يكافحون للتهرب من ثلاثة أسئلة، والاجابات التي تكمن وراء كل فكرة وشعور وعمل لدى الانسان، سواء أكان واعياً بذلك أم لا: أين أنا؟ كيف أعرف ذلك؟ ماذا عليّ أن أفعل؟
ومع تقدم الوقت يكبرون بما يكفي لفهم هذا الاسئلة، إذ يعتقد البشر أنهم يعرفون الاجابات!
أين أنا؟ الجواب: في العراق!
كيف أعرف ذلك؟ الجواب: انه بديهي!
ماذا عليّ أن أفعل؟ الجواب: كلّ ما يفعله الجميع!
رغم هذه الاجابات فهم ليسوا واثقين من انفسهم، وليسوا سعداء جداً، ويعيشون في بعض الاحيان خوفاً لا سبب له! وشعوراً غير محددّ، لا يمكنهم تفسيره أو التخلّص منه! فهم لم يكتشفوا قطّ حقيقة أن المشكلة تأتي من الاسئلة الثلاثة التي لم تتم الاجابة عليها. وأنّ هناك علماً واحداً فقط يمكنه الاجابة عليها وهو الفلسفة.
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لا يمكن للإنسان أن يوجد من دون أيّ شكل من أشكال الفلسفة، أي دون نظرة شاملة إلى الحياة. فمعظم البشر ليسوا مبتكرين للأفكار، لكنهم مجرد متقبّلين لها، وهم قادرون على الحكم على تلك الأفكار بشكل نقديّ واختيار المسار الصحيح، متى أمكن لهم ذلك ومتى قُدم لهم.
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هناك عدد كبير من البشر الذين هم غير مبالين بالأفكار وغير مكترثين بأي شيء خارج نطاق المحسوس المرتبط باللحظة الفورية المباشرة؛ وهؤلاء البشر يقبلون لا شعوريًّا بكل ما تقدمه بهم ثقافة زمانهم، والتبني الأعمى لأي تيار يصادفهم. إنهم مجرد سبّورة اجتماعية  -سواء كانوا عمّالًا أو رؤساء شركات- وهم باختيارهم يكونون غير ذوي صلة بمصير العالم.
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واليوم، يدرك معظم الناس تماماً فراغنا الثقافيّ الأيديولوجيّ؛ فهم قلقون ومرتبكون ويتلمّسون الحصول على إجابات. فهل أنت قادر على تنويرهم؟ وهل يمكنك الإجابة على أسئلتهم؟ وهل يمكنك أن تقدّم لهم حالة من الثبات؟ وهل تعلم كيفيّة تصويب أخطائهم؟ وهل أنت محصّن من تداعيات الوابل المستمرّ الذي يهدف إلى تدمير العقل؟ وهل يمكنك تزويد الآخرين بصواريخ مضادّة للقذائف؟ فالمعركة السياسيّة هي مجرّد مناوشات تُخاض بالبنادق؛ أمّا المعركة الفلسفيّة فهي بمثابة الحرب النوويّة.

''If you want to influence a country's intellectual trend, the first step is to bring order to your own ideas and integrate them into a consistent case, to the best of your knowledge and ability. This does not mean memorizing and reciting slogans and principles, Objectivist or otherwise: knowledge necessarily includes the ability to apply abstract ideas principles to concrete problems, to recognize the principles in specific issues, to demonstrate them, and to advocate a consistent course of action.''

Айн Ранд е от този тип шарлатани като Рон Хъбард и много други, които скалъпват набързо без особен талант някаква квази религия или секта, за да печелят от лековерните си последователи. Това, което отличава Ранд от подобните ѝ, е нейната "философска" претенция. Истината е, чя тя няма талант нито за писател, нито притежава така необходимата за един философски ум дълбочина. Изисква се особен тип глупост да не си в състояние да забележиш това, което се отнася както за нея така и за нейните фенове, т.н рандроиди. Тя е смятала себе си за голям интелектуалец, или поне така се твърди, насърчавайки най-лошите човешки черти, наследени още от времето на дивачеството и представяйки ги за големи ценности. Нищо чудно, че има още хора приветсващи един неморален кретен и егоист, или идиот по старогръцки. Не е чудно и това, че тя никога не е била приемана насериозно в академичните среди.

There are a few things that are made explicitly clear by this collection of Rand's works:
1. She hates, I mean REALLY hates, Skinner and Kant.
2. It's easy to see how narcissists use her philosophy to justify their own self-perceived magnificence, because she is their patron saint.

I'll leave number 1 alone, because quite frankly I'm not quite equipped to handle it, mainly due to the fact that my cognitive capacities were reduced to TV fuzz the longer she prattled on about each man's work. Which is not to say that I necessarily disagree with her viewpoint, it is just that I frequently get distracted by her insistence on quoting her own shit. Did you know that she wrote Atlas Shrugged? No? No problem. Because she will tell you over and over and over and over...as she quotes nearly no one else but herself, EVER.

Which brings me to the second point. Rand ultimately has many important things to say regarding personal responsibility and self-worth, but her utter lack of humility discredits her to many. The fact that entire pieces are dedicated to the evisceration of book reviews as opposed to the actually source material, because she chooses to not go philosophically "slumming," is ridiculous and academically ill-conceived. Unless, of course, you believe everything you write or do is "gold, Jerry! Gold!"

I read this book to do just that; to absorb some of the source material behind Rand's brand of some of the worst "fiction" I have ever read. I told you she wrote Atlas Shrugged, right? And...I'm done. I get it.

This is a good supplemental piece to the fictional Fountainhead and Atlas shrugged. I find her logic pretty straight forward. I was intrigued by all the lovers of Kant who rate this book low because she does attack Kant's feelings about moral "stuff". I tend to think Kant was a bit full of crap myself, so this book doesn't bother me one bit. People don't just do things because it's right. They do things because they like doing things that are right, (morally right), but let's not fool ourselves, the self is still coming first. I'm down with that.

I love her article on education that discusses the biases inherent in education. Her ideas are still exceptionally controversial. it's important to understand that less of this "structure" that we live in now existed during her time and she was fighting the structures that currently oppress us in indirect ways. For that reason, I think she's libel to be misunderstood.

Although I think she makes really good points. And her essays that state human beings as volitional beings who if they do not choose to grow an active mind will turn into passive creatures who don't understand what's going on around them were phenomenal . My favorites were 'Philosophy who needs it' and 'The Missing Link'. And I found her views on capitalism to be enlightening and the denouncement of Kantian morality refreshing, not painting human beings as demons for not being selfless. But her constant demonization of Immanuel Kant himself really did her point more harm than good. Also she takes a radical philosophy of objectivism/rational egoism and being so dogmatic in believing 'rationality' to be 'lack of compassion' did make me like this collection less. So all in all for my first non fiction philosophy book I would say it was OK, not really in the sense of enjoying it(stale writing, repetition...) but learning from it.

This is the last book of Ayn Rand I intend to read. Her rigidity philosophically comes out here, to the point of being incoherent. She claims that philosophy is king -- conceptualization is necessary for living a full life, and yet her insistence on Objectivism, that Truth can be calibrated to through your raw senses is absolutely incoherent.

Hence we have anti-conceptualization at the heart of Rand's conceptual philosophy.

What I find to be of interest is that despite her rigidity she makes fairly adequate characterizations of other's philosophies, hypocrisies and thoughts... up to a point. Rand doesn't seem to understand that the problems inherent within philosophy are different, that philosophers are attempting to answer different thoughts in different ways. She doesn't get why anyone else would say anything different than she does. And she doesn't seem to have any feeling other than claiming that others speak from hatred of reality. Rand lives her Soviet terror seemingly in nearly every essay that she shows passion, claiming that her detractors and various anti-conceptual individuals are the same people as her tormentors in Soviet Russia.

While she is intelligent, her remarks are often consistent with her dogma, making her unintelligible. Her main fascination for me was to mine her ideas and utilize them as coherency points. I use her rigidity as a metric to gauge other people's works against. Reading these essays were jarring sometimes. Systems are often cohered around the minimal difference, a tension inherent within the construction of the system. Rand's system required that she pile all the desirable good things on one side and all the things she didn't like on the other. Her essays became jarring because her simplistic language would often topple in her reasoning and she would be left with repeating herself over and over without being able to give any difference between one side and the other. This led her to babble, which was annoying and jarring because her dogma broke the flow of her essays.

In a way, reading Rand is like watching a bad movie. Rand has good aspects in her deployment at times, and she shows you what not to do, or conversely, how to ruin an idea by drawing it too forcefully. I am done reading her, I have had enough. She can say no more.

hard to track.

Great clarification on questions I had, and explaining of problems I never even recognized. Gets to the root of philosophy. Particularly valued the parts on epistemology

Rand's non fiction can be a tough pill to swallow. I stand by so many of her ideas and philosophies but I cannot help feeling like the respective parts are greater than the "whole." In reading these speeches and essays I had dozens of "aha" moments and I certainly took some serious food for thought from these posthumous pages. As I've stated in other reviews, i subscribe to the mentality that developing your own set of ideals and philosophies should be pieced together from everything you read, not taken verbatim from any one thinker or movement. Rand's essays and speeches can provide a killer foundation in bits and pieces, but her political rants and the mind battering force feeding of the "capitalism vs. altruism" stuff gets a little self-indulgent and feels forced rather than provided. However, in addition to her other books, this is a short read that will leave you in a mist of interest and critical thinking. But as far as her politics... You've been warned.