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Friday, August 19, 2005 - 8:09amSanction this postReply
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I watched that last night as well Marcus, fascinating story.

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Friday, August 19, 2005 - 9:52amSanction this postReply
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Yes it was.

And I think this is a quote that Rand would have loved to have been made about herself as well.


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Friday, August 19, 2005 - 9:56amSanction this postReply
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Giving Marcus the benefit of the doubt I resisted my initial urge to rant on this quote.  Now I'm curious.  Anyone care to fill me in on the details?

Sarah


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Friday, August 19, 2005 - 10:45amSanction this postReply
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Sarah,

Voltaire wrote:

“She was a great man whose only fault was in being a woman. A woman who translated and explained Newton ….. a very great man.”

Voltaire was her lover at one stage. She had many lovers, some of most famous intellectuals of the time.

She was an independent and gifted mathematician that lived in the 1700's.

In 1759 and she composed the only French translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, that is still used in France to this day.

She also predicted and explained Leibnitz's experimental proof  of ‘mv2’ as the definition of energy.

She had an affair with a young French soldier in her early forties and became pregnant. She died as a result of the subsequent childbirth.

She wrote on feminism herself:

"I feel the full weight of the prejudice which so universally excludes us from the sciences; it is one of the contradictions in life that has always amazed me, ….. Why these creatures whose understanding appears in every way similar to that of men, seem to be stopped by some irresistible force, this side of a barrier. Let the people give a reason, but until they do, women will have reason to protest against their education ..... If I were king I would redress an abuse that cuts back, as it were, one half of human kind. I would have women participate in all human rights, especially those of the mind ….. The new education would greatly benefit the human race. Women would be worth more and men would gain something new to emulate …… I am convinced that either many women are unaware of their talents by reason of the fault in their education or they bury them on account of prejudice ….. My own experience confirms this. Chance made me aquainted with men of letters who extended the hand of friendship to me ….. I then began to believe that I was a being with a mind ….."

(Edited by Marcus Bachler on 8/19, 10:47am)


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Friday, August 19, 2005 - 11:33amSanction this postReply
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Thanks Marcus, I suspected the sentiment would be something like that.

Sarah


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Post 5

Friday, August 19, 2005 - 12:59pmSanction this postReply
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This brings up something I've been wondering about for some time. Great accomplishments just about demand sexual celebration, and a great man without a steady romantic partner is never expected to go for long without a sexual celebration of his achievement. If he is male, one takes this for granted. And if it is mentioned at all, it is parenthetically and in a footnote. But about a woman, as in this case - or Marie Curie, or Ayn Rand - her sex life becomes one of the first things one hears about.

In the first draft of Atlas, Dagny was never without a lover for long. Ayn Rand eventually decided that this was a distraction, and eliminated all but the Big 3. And note that the only front-line protagonist in AS who is celibate for long is Francisco - who is compelled by the context to destroy instead of creating (no creation -> no celebrating.)

In our time, the inventor of the birth control pill was one of the grat benefactors of humankind ever. Great heroes will not die in childbirth any more. We are as fortunate to have been his contemporaries as Ayn Rand's.

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