Leonard Peikoff

Leonard Peikoff is an Objectivist philosopher

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I will not vote for any Republican until the party repudiates its affiliation with Christianity.

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• To save the world is the simplest thing in the world. All one has to do is think. (Source: http://www.peikoff.com [Peikoff's personal web site], masthead)

• The unphilosophical majority among men are the ones most helplessly dependent on their era's dominant ideas. In times of crises these men need the guidance of some kind of theory; but, being unfamiliar with the field of ideas, they do not know that alternatives to the popular theories are possible. They know only what they have always been taught.

• [The proud man] does not demand of himself the impossible, but he does demand every ounce of the possible. He refuses to rest content with a defective soul, shrugging in self-deprecation 'That's me.' He knows that that 'me' was created, and is alterable, by him.

• To those who oppose war, I ask: If not now, when? How many more corpses are necessary before this country should take action?

• Responsible parenthood involves decades devoted to the child's proper nurture. To sentence a woman to bear a child against her will is an unspeakable violation of her rights: her right to liberty (to the functions of her body), her right to the pursuit of happiness, and, sometimes, her right to life itself, even as a serf. Such a sentence represents the sacrifice of the actual to the potential, of a real human being to a piece of protoplasm, which has no life in the human sense of the term. It is sheer perversion of language for people who demand this sacrifice to call themselves 'right-to-lifers.'

• Person A: Your objection to the self-evident has no validity. There is no such thing as disagreement. People agree about everything.
  Person B: That’s absurd; people disagree constantly, and about all kinds of things.
  Person A: How can they? There’s nothing to disagree about; no subject matter. After all, nothing exists.
  Person B: Nonsense. All kinds of things exist, you know that as well as I do.
  Person A: That’s one. You must accept the existence axiom, even to utter the term “disagreement.” But to continue, I still maintain that disagreement is unreal. How can people disagree when they are unconscious beings who are unable to hold any ideas at all?
  Person B: Of course people hold ideas. They are conscious beings. You know that.
  Person A: There’s another axiom, but even so, why is disagreement about axioms a problem? Why should it suggest that one or more of the parties is mistaken? Perhaps all of the people who disagree about the very same point are equally, objectively right.
  Person B: That’s impossible. If two ideas contradict each other, they can’t both be right. Contradictions can’t exist in reality. After all, A is A.
  • Dialogue used to show that existence, conciousness, identity, and non-contradiction are axioms, using A as a defender of the axioms, and B as an opponent of the axioms (From the book "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand")