Ayn Rand Quotes
I am a man who does not exist for others.
Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. Bobbs-Merrill, 1943.
In the golden intellectual and science eras of Arabian Islam from 900-1300 individualism and independence of thought were much cherished virtues. In the 1100s, there began a period of theological and intellectual closing where the individual’s views were expected to conform to that of the then “proper” interpretation of the Koran and Islamic Dominance over all things. By the 1300s there were few Arab Muslims who would speak out for individual freedom of thought and rugged intellectual independence from the doctrine of the times. He was one of the few who advocated being back to the “old days” when Islam was far ahead of the intellectual thinking of the world. Few paid heed and Arab Islam has for the last 800 years been a shadow of its former intellectual achievements and has become a backward, stultified set of societies where one rarely finds an intellectual who does not depend on the community consensus and the values of the mullahs and muftis of the time rather than their own.
Ayn Rand was a Russian-American writer and philosopher. She is known for her two best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, she moved to the United States in 1926. She had a play produced on Broadway in 1935 and 1936. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. In 1957, Rand published her best-known work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own periodicals and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982.
