 "We don't need to make a movie out of [Atlas Shrugged] ... We are living it right now."
David Kelley
"Atlas Shrugged: From Fiction to Fact in 52 years"
Society is no more a God or a master than it is a family. It is a panoply of opportunities for rewarding exchanges with other self-owning individuals in pursuit of our own happines.
David Kelley
Life: Your Adventure in Entrepreneurship
You have a life. It’s a precious thing, and it’s yours. Make the most of it. Don’t give it up, don’t waste it on things you don’t value, regardless of what others demand from you. Work with others when you can, love and give yourself to them as they deserve—but always by the standard of what is best for your own life. The purpose of ethics is to help you find and enjoy what is best, not to sacrifice it. Pursuing your happiness, taking full responsibility for it, is a worthy and challenging task. It will take thought and effort, it will take ambition and courage, it will take everything you have, and if you succeed you will have the right to be proud, morally proud, of what you have accomplished.
David Kelley
"A Philosophy for the 21st Century." The New Individualist. Oct. 2007: 49
...innovation has to some extent been discouraged in the Objectivist movement. I think a lot of people who might have done something have been turned off by the act of getting their work approved or making sure that they were not crossing someone higher up in the movement. That's why I think a hierarchical structure is not a good thing in an intellectual movement.
David Kelley
Interview with Full Context http://rous.redbarn.org/objectivism/Writing/DavidKelley/FullContextInterview.html
I think the marketplace of ideas is very much like the marketplace of goods and services. No one could plan it or predict it.
David Kelley
Interview with Full Context http://rous.redbarn.org/objectivism/Writing/DavidKelley/FullContextInterview.html
The fact that we must initiate and direct the process of thought means that we must not subordinate our judgment of the facts to the minds of others, no matter how numerous; and that the sense of efficacy that is crucial to self-esteem is ours to achieve by our own effort.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
Objectivists have too often relied on stereotypical formulations of Ayn Rand's ideas. They have been quick to pounce on thinkers who might have been their allies. They have greeted new extensions of the system with a timid caution that reminds me of the Council of Scholars in Anthem, who spent fifty years debating the wisdom of accepting that radical innovation, the candle.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
... a real movement will not have a single leader. At any given time there will be a number of individuals who distinguish themselves by their work. There will be a dense network of personal relationships and organized groups.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
If we assume in advance that anyone who rejects our ideas must be irrational, we have started down the path that turned Marxism and Freudianism into secular religions.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
An Objectivist thinker must be a thinker first, an Objectivist second.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
When Ayn Rand urged us to check our premises, she never exempted her own.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
Suppose an Objectivist philosopher disagrees with Ayn Rand on some particular point. This does not necessarily mean that he rejects her view on all the other principles to which the point in question is logically related. It may well be that he takes the position he does because he regards it as the true implication of those principles.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
A literary work is a creation, the concrete embodiment of an idea by a specific author. A philosophy, by contrast, is a body of theoretical knowledge about reality. That is why, as Ayn Rand herself pointed out, a philosophical discovery cannot be copyrighted. The discovery itself, as distinct from a specific text in which it is conveyed, is not the property of the discoverer. Property must be concrete, but a philosophy is a viewpoint that may be held by an open-ended number of people.
David Kelley
Truth and Toleration
|
