Top 50 Leonard Peikoff Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “To save the world is the simplest thing in the world. All one has to do is think.”

— Leonard Peikoff

2. “Clarity is achieved when concretes are united by a concept and a concept is seen to be a union of those concretes. The two gravest breaches of clarity are: a set of unrelated instances that causes too much pressure on consciousness and a floating abstraction untied to reality. These.”

— Leonard Peikoff

3. “Providence,” said Hitler to Rauschning, has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing men from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge; from the dirty and degrading self-mortifications of a chimera called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and personal independence which only a very few can bear.45.”

— Leonard Peikoff

4. “The worse the coming future, the more it should motivate its opponents.”

— Leonard Peikoff

5. “The best-known version of this view, the Existentialism of the fifties and sixties, held that reality is absurd and that irrational passion is the only means of knowledge.”

— Leonard Peikoff

6. “Hegel would not have been possible but for Kant, who would not have been possible but for Plato. These three, more than any others, are the intellectual builders of Auschwitz.”

— Leonard Peikoff

7. “Each man must reach his own verdict, by weighing all the relevant evidence.”

— Leonard Peikoff

8. “The unphilosophical majority among men are the ones most helplessly dependent on their era’s dominant ideas.”

— Leonard Peikoff

9. “Under communism, there is collective ownership of property de jure. Under Nazism, there is the same collective ownership de facto.”

— Leonard Peikoff

10. “Observe in this connection that the Nazis, correctly, regarded the power of propaganda as an indispensable tool.”

— Leonard Peikoff

11. “We dare not brush aside unexplained a horror such as Nazism. If we are to avoid a fate like that of Germany, we must find out what made such a fate possible. We must find out what, at root, is required to turn a country, Germany or any other, into a Nazi dictatorship; and then we must uproot that root. We.”

— Leonard Peikoff

12. “The artist is the closest man comes to being God.”

— Leonard Peikoff

13. “No weird cultural aberration produced Nazism. No intellectual lunatic fringe miraculously overwhelmed a civilized country. It is modern philosophy – not some peripheral aspect of it, but the most central of its mainstreams – which turned the Germans into a nation of killers. The land of poets and philosophers was brought down by its poets and philosophers.”

— Leonard Peikoff

14. “To liberate humanity from intelligence, Hitler counted on the doctrines of irrationalism. To rid men of conscience, he counted on the morality of altruism. To free the world of freedom, he counted on the idea of collectivism.”

— Leonard Peikoff

15. “In a primacy-of-consciousness philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to the ruling consciousness, such as God or society. In Ayn Rand’s philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to existence; it consists of a man’s recognizing facts and then acting accordingly.”

— Leonard Peikoff

16. “The nationalists, at heart, were socialists. The socialists, at heart, were nationalists.”

— Leonard Peikoff

17. “The language and themes of the classics are too difficult for today’s students to grasp; one does not teach Shakespeare to savages, or to civilized children being turned into savages.”

— Leonard Peikoff

18. “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

19. “The fundamental goal of education, writes Dewey, ”is the development of a spirit of social co-operation and community life... “ The goal is to foster the child’s ”social capacity“ – by, among other things, ”saturating him with the spirit of service... “21.”

— Leonard Peikoff

20. “I say close down the schools of education. At most, all that is required is a one-year post-high school course on practical advice: tips on motivating;.”

— Leonard Peikoff

21. “In any compromise between food and poison,” Ayn Rand writes, “it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.”

— Leonard Peikoff

22. “A philosophy of education, in short, is essential to being a proper parent; otherwise, you are merely turning your child over to blind chance.”

— Leonard Peikoff

23. “The defenders of capitalism spent their time broadcasting the vibrations of guilt and futility. Implicitly or explicitly, they were telling the country: human intelligence is impotent to control the course of society, men are helpless in the face of their own motivation, laissez-faire appeals to the evil in men, but men are stuck with it.”

— Leonard Peikoff

24. “The sneer is expressed by philosophic movements which boastfully offer no message, by educators who deliberately teach no subject matter, by artists whose work eliminates recognizable content, by psychologists who hold that ideas are mere rationalizations, by novelists such as Thomas Mann, and by all the alleged valuers in all these groups, which purport to love Mankind as a whole, a love whose reality may be gauged by a single fact: the same groups extol Mankind, while vilifying men – and man.”

— Leonard Peikoff

25. “The mental practice that underlies the anti-effort attitude is the act of evasion, of blanking out some fact of reality which one dislikes. This act constitutes the essence of irrationality and, therefore, of evil. Evasion is the Objectivist equivalent of a mortal sin. It is the only such sin that we recognize, because it is what makes possible every other form of moral corruption. 27.”

— Leonard Peikoff

26. “The man who waits for reality to write the truth inside his soul waits in vain.”

— Leonard Peikoff

27. “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

28. “The voters were aware of the Nazi ideology. Nazi literature, including statements of the Nazi plans for the future, papered the country during the last years of the Weimar Republic. Mein Kampf alone sold more than 200,000 copies between 1925 and 1932. The essence of the political system which Hitler intended to establish in Germany was clear.”

— Leonard Peikoff

29. “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

30. “Nazism in politics was a form of statism. In principle, it did not represent a new approach to government; it was a continuation of the political absolutism – the absolute monarchies, the oligarchies, the theocracies, the random tyrannies – which has characterized most of human history.”

— Leonard Peikoff

31. “Racial subjectivism holds that a man’s inborn racial constitution determines his mental processes, his intellectual outlook, his thought patterns, his feelings, his conclusions – and that these conclusions, however well established, are valid only for members of a given race, who share the same underlying constitution.”

— Leonard Peikoff

32. “An interest,” writes Kant, “is present only in a dependent will which is not of itself always in accord with reason; in the divine will we cannot conceive of an interest.”

— Leonard Peikoff

33. “In an advanced, civilized country, a handful of men were able to gain for their criminal schemes the enthusiastic backing of millions of decent, educated, law-abiding citizens. What is the factor that made this possible?”

— Leonard Peikoff

34. “Science, indeed, is nothing more than the conceptual unravelling of sensory data; it has no other primary evidence from which to proceed.”

— Leonard Peikoff

35. “The pre-Greek civilizations, never discovering the field of epistemology, had no explicit idea of a cognitive process which is systematic, secular, observation-based, logic-ruled; the medievals for centuries had no access to most of this knowledge. The dominant, mystical ideas of such cultures represent a nonrational approach to the world, not an antirational approach.”

— Leonard Peikoff

36. “Most men, however, do not consider such issues in explicit terms. They absorb their ideas – implicitly, eclectically, and with many contradictions – from the cultural atmosphere around them, building into their souls without identifying it the various ideological vibrations emanating from school and church and arts and media and mores.”

— Leonard Peikoff

37. “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

38. “Evil, for Objectivism, means the willful ignorance or defiance of reality. This has to mean: that which cannot deal with reality, that which is whim-ridden, context-dropping, self-contradictory. Evil is consistent in only one regard: its essence is consistently at war with all the values and virtues human life requires.”

— Leonard Peikoff

39. “The Nazis could not have won the support of the German masses but for the systematic preaching of a complex array of theories, doctrines, opinions, notions, beliefs. And not one of their central beliefs was original. They found those beliefs, widespread and waiting, in the culture; they seized upon them and broadcast them at top volume, thrusting them with a new intensity back into the streets of Germany.”

— Leonard Peikoff

40. “In degree, however, the total state does differ from its predecessors: it represents statism pressed to its limits, in theory and in practice, devouring the last remnants of the individual.”

— Leonard Peikoff

41. “By virtue of being able directly to discriminate one aspect of reality, a consciousness cannot discriminate some other aspect that would require a different kind of sense organs. Whatever facts the senses do register, however, are facts. And these facts are what lead a mind eventually to the rest of its knowledge.”

— Leonard Peikoff

42. “Social justice” in this view not only allows but demands the use of force against the non-sacrificial individual; it demands that others put a stop to his evil. Thus has moral fervor been joined to the rule of physical force, raising it from a criminal tactic to a governing principle of human relationships.”

— Leonard Peikoff

43. “When the Americans flocked to pragmatism, they believed that they were joining a battle to advance their essential view of reality and of life. They did not know that they were being marched in the opposite direction, that the battle had been calculated for a diametrically opposite purpose, or that the enemy they were being pushed to destroy was: themselves.”

— Leonard Peikoff

44. “The system which Hitler established – the social reality which so many Germans were so eager to embrace or so willing to endure – the politics which began in a theory and ended in Auschwitz – was: the “total state.” The term, from which the adjective “totalitarian” derives, was coined by Hitler’s mentor, Mussolini.”

— Leonard Peikoff

45. “Induction means really the process of coming to conclusions on the basis of observation. Deduction is the process of coming to conclusions on the basis of earlier abstractions.”

— Leonard Peikoff

46. “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

47. “The principles of morality are a product not of feeling, but of cognition.”

— Leonard Peikoff

48. “A country with a philosophic base, freed of fundamental uncertainty and guilt, would not tolerate leaders who evade every choice, crawl down the middle of every road, and wait for the deluge. It would not tolerate any deluge by the waves of self-righteous, man-hating evil, foreign or domestic. It would not apologize for its greatness to the worshipers of weakness. It would not watch in despair while its youth turned in despair to cults, communes, and cocaine.”

— Leonard Peikoff

49. “Religious writers often claim that the cause of Nazism is the secularism or the scientific spirit of the modern world. This evades the facts that the Germans at the time, especially in Prussia, were one of the most religious peoples in Western Europe; that the Weimar Republic was a hotbed of mystic cults, of which Nazism was one; and that Germany’s largest and most devout religious group, the Lutherans, counted themselves among Hitler’s staunchest followers.”

— Leonard Peikoff

50. “The more you learn, if you learn it properly, the more clear you become and the more you know.”

— Leonard Peikoff