Internet Quotes About Ayn Rand

http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?id=17345

Sales of Ayn Rand Books Reach 25 million Copies
April 7, 2008

Irvine, CA—Since the publication of Ayn Rand's first novel, We the Living, 72 years ago, sales of her books increased exponentially, having recently reached the mark of 25 million copies, a staggering figure considering the length of her two major novels and the philosophical nature of their themes and ideas.

We the Living, whose theme Ayn Rand described as "the supreme value of a human life and the evil of a totalitarian state that claims the right to sacrifice it," had a small initial printing of three thousand copies. The novel, which tells the story of three individuals facing an all-powerful communist state, steadily gained popularity through word of mouth, as did all of Ayn Rand's novels, and 70 years later has sold more than 3 million copies.

Anthem, Ayn Rand's shortest novel, was published two years later, in 1938, and so far has sold more than 4 million copies. Anthem portrays the struggle of an individual to discover his ego and gain his independence in a futuristic society where individualism is ruthlessly suppressed and the word "I" is no longer used--in conversation or thought.

The recurring theme of the conflict between individualism and collectivism is also present in Ayn Rand's third novel, The Fountainhead, published in 1943. This conflict is dramatized in the story of Howard Roark, an architect whose independent vision and unbreakable artistic integrity pits him against the mediocrity and conformism prevalent in his own profession and in the society of his time. Sales of The Fountainhead reached 20,000 copies in its first six months of existence, climbed to 150,000 copies two years after its initial publication, and recently surpassed 6.5 million copies.

Ayn Rand's last and most important novel, Atlas Shrugged, was first published in 1957 and, like The Fountainhead, has sold more than 6 million copies since its release. With a theme stated by Ayn Rand as "the role of the mind in man's existence," it sought to demonstrate "a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest" and to present a "moral defense of capitalism." The plot of Atlas Shrugged involves the mysterious disappearance of the most able and productive individuals in a collectivist society that oppresses and exploits them while refusing to recognize their need to function in freedom.

The powerful themes and gripping plots of Ayn Rand's stories gained the attention and admiration of millions of readers who, over the span of seven decades, have bought 20 million copies of her novels. Ayn Rand fans also bought 5 million copies of her nonfiction writings, which include essay anthologies such as For the New Intellectual (1 million copies sold), The Virtue of Selfishness (1.25 million copies sold), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (600,000 copies sold) and the Romantic Manifesto (350,000 copies sold).

In 2007 alone, more than 800,000 copies of Ayn Rand's novels were sold, along with 60,000 copies of her nonfiction books--both figures all-time annual records.

According to Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, the enduring appeal of Ayn Rand's writings should not be surprising: "Ayn Rand offers readers the opportunity to experience masterful plots with heroes who show us the crucial importance of reason and the supreme value of pursuing our own individual happiness. Based on the growing popularity of her books since their publication, we can confidently predict that sales are bound to increase--and that's a hopeful development not only for the future of capitalism in America but also for the future of freedom on Earth.”

Dr. Yaron Brook

http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=about_ayn_rand_aynrand_biography

Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905. At age six she taught herself to read and two years later discovered her first fictional hero in a French magazine for children, thus capturing the heroic vision which sustained her throughout her life. At the age of nine, she decided to make fiction writing her career. Thoroughly opposed to the mysticism and collectivism of Russian culture, she thought of herself as a European writer, especially after encountering Victor Hugo, the writer she most admired.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/marcbabej/2011/04/17/atlas-shrugged-movie-boosts-book-to-4-on-amazon-bestseller-list/

by Marc Babej: Here’s a marketing question I thought I’d never ask: Would you think that a critically panned, low-budget movie, with a virtually unknown director and cast, could catapult a more than 50 year-old book near the top of the Amazon bestseller list? Well, exactly that appears to be happening with the movie adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/01/08/conservative_libertarianisms_comeback__99823.html

Conservative Libertarianism's Comeback

By David Paul Kuhn

The philosophical casualty of the Great Recession was supposed to be libertarianism. But signs to the contrary are thriving.

Americans are increasingly opposed to activist government programs. The most significant social movement of 2009, the Tea Party protests, grew out of that opposition. Libertarian heroine Ayn Rand is as popular today as ever. Rand's brilliant and radical laissez faire novel "Atlas Shrugged," sold roughly 300,000 copies last year, according to BookScan, twice its sales in 2008 and roughly triple annual sales in recent decades.

We are witnessing a conservative libertarian comeback. It's an oppositional advance, a response to all manners of active-state liberalism since the financial crisis. It's a pervasive feeling of invasiveness. It's an enduring conclusion among many voters--independent and conservative, working and middle class alike--that big government costs in taxes significantly more than it offers them personally. That belief has been aggravated since late 2008. The result? The factional bastions of traditional libertarianism, like Washington think tank Cato, now have an intangible and awkward alliance with a broad swath of the American electorate.

. . . Sweeping financial reform remains elusive. Meanwhile, health care reform has proven unable to escape the rising anti-government sentiment. Nearly half of the public generally opposes Congressional proposals to overhaul the health care system, while little more than a third support it, according to the Pew Research Center. The chief reason cited by the legislation's opponents: "too much government involvement in health care."

For the first time this decade, more Americans, 50 percent, said providing health care for everyone was not the government's responsibility according to Gallup. Three years earlier, 69 percent said it was the government's responsibility to provide universal health care.

Nick Gillespie, editor of the libertarian publication Reason, sees a straight line between the unpopular financial bailouts, started under the Bush administration, and Democrats' unpopular health care bill today.

"It's the rule of the few at the expense of the many," Gillespie said.

Indeed. Today's limited libertarian revival is a response to a sense of overreaching elite technocrats, skepticism of how tax dollars are spent and a fear of intrusive bureaucracy. Responsiveness to a sense of overreach is the core impulse. Rand's radical libertarianism, where man is an ends in himself and the welfare state is fundamentally immoral, was a response to the radically invasive Soviet state that weaned her as a girl. On a drastically less extreme scale, one side of this American debate could not exist without the other. The Obama administration brought with it ambitions of a resurgence of FDR and LBJ's active-state liberalism. And with it, Obama has revived the enduring American challenge to the state.

http://www.campbell.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2667

Oct 10, 2011 John Campbell = Congressman

Ayn Rand is bigger than ever. But are her new fans radical enough for capitalism? - Reason Magazine

Ayn Rand, the Russian-born novelist and philosopher, died in 1982. But in this Bush-Obama season of fantastical government growth and encroachment into all areas of human activity, Rand has become a Banquo’s ghost at the banquet of politics, an antistate spirit haunting politicians and commentators who thought her free-market worldview was safely buried by the fall 2008 financial collapse.

Signs of the Rand revival abound. The surprisingly large anti-government Tea Party protests have been chock-a-block with signs such as “Atlas Is Shrugging” and “The name is Galt. John Galt.” Sales of Rand’s classic Atlas Shrugged have soared in 2009, above a level that was already extremely impressive for a 1,000-page, critically unloved, 52-year-old novel. Two major publishing houses brought out new biographies of Rand almost simultaneously this fall. And after decades of Hollywood development limbo, Atlas Shrugged may finally be hitting the screen soon in the form of a cable mini-series starring Charlize Theron.

Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.), who gives out copies of Atlas Shrugged to departing interns, and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who says Rand inspired his political career, both have said recently that the age of Barack Obama reminds them of the statist dystopia portrayed in the novel. Ryan—who stresses that, as a Catholic, he is not a full-fledged adherent to Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, which embraces atheism as well as laissez faire—says that as he looks around Washington these days he can’t help but think he’s seeing a lot of Wesley Mouch, the sleazy lobbyist in Atlas Shrugged who rises through his connections to become a de facto economic dictator.

“What’s happening now is Americans are awakening to see [that] this enduring principle of self-government and individualism is being taken away,” Ryan says. “I really believe the entire moral premise of capitalism is being shaken to its core because of the acceleration of government right now, and that’s waking people up.”

Ed Hudgins, director of advocacy with the Atlas Society, an organization that promotes Rand’s philosophy, says that when he looks at House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and federally owned mortgage lender Freddie Mac, he thinks of another Atlas Shrugged character: banker Eugene Lawson, who in Hudgins’ words “destroys his bank and a good part of the state of Wisconsin because he’s making loans based not on sound business practice but on the basis of need.”

Many political bloggers this year have preferred to invoke one of Rand’s heroes by spreading the idea that more and more people may soon be “going Galt”—that is, following the example of Atlas Shrugged hero John Galt by going “on strike” against an overly statist America.

And it isn’t just Rand devotees who are seeing her shadow across the landscape. As The Economist noted in February, “Whenever governments intervene in the market…readers rush to buy Rand’s book. Why? The reason is explained by the name of a recently formed group on Facebook, the world’s biggest social networking site: ‘Read the news today? It’s like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is happening in real life.’ ” To Rand’s fans, the U.K. Guardian explained in March, “the Obama administration’s support for beleaguered homeowners and banks…smacks of tyrannical socialism, forcing the strong and successful to prop up the weak, feckless and incompetent.” Everyone seems to agree: Ayn Rand is back, and more relevant than ever.

But will those who are freshly encountering or rediscovering Rand really embrace her radicalism? As important as she remains to the post–World War II American political and intellectual scene, Rand comes with baggage that slows the spread of her ideas, making it difficult for an explicitly Randian political/intellectual movement to gain traction.

More than ever, Rand’s uncompromising and unconservative (though hyper-free-market) vision rubs violently against the realities of contemporary American politics of both right and left. That her ideas are spread mostly via novels, and not nonfiction or polemics, renders reader reaction to her hard to replicate. Despite the obvious signs of a Rand resurgence, from Congress to Tea Parties, from biographies to political chatter, from Main Street to Hollywood, it remains highly unlikely that the author’s ideas will become remotely as successful in politics as they are in publishing. The American Atlas may be grumbling, but he isn’t shrugging yet.

Atlas Shrugged portrays a world reduced to terrifying dysfunction by a government fanatically dedicated to managing and manipulating the economy in the name of fairness and helping the needy. It’s a scenario that many see as scarily similar to America in 2009.

As in Atlas Shrugged, the U.S. is suffering through a shrinking, staggering economy. One of its major transportation industries is falling into the calcifying hands of government management (trains in Atlas, autos now). Pull and connections in the nation’s capital are often more important than productivity in determining whether a business will thrive. The most heeded political voices are calling for one-sixth of the economy to be subsumed by the state in the name of universal health coverage. The political leader of the United States identifies “selfishness” as his own greatest moral failing and says that the country’s biggest sin is not caring enough for the “least.”

. . .

The most concrete indication of the Rand revival is the increasing number of Americans laying down money to live in her world. During one week in late August, for example, Atlas Shrugged sold 67 percent more copies than it did the same week a year before, and 114 percent more than that same week in 2007. According to Kara Welsh of Rand’s imprint, New American Library, the company shipped 25 percent more copies of Atlas Shrugged in the first half of 2009 than it did for all of 2008, for a total so far this year of more than 300,000. That means that only around 40 new novels in 2009 sold more total copies, according to Publishers Weekly sales figures on 2009 bestsellers. Even the hardcover of Atlas Shrugged has sold nearly 20,000 copies this year, a number that would make it reasonably successful as a new hardcover novel, let alone one that’s been available for half a century.

“Certain novels have stood the test of time,” Welsh says, comparing Atlas Shrugged with the likes of 1984 or To Kill a Mockingbird. “Her works stand with those kinds of classics that consistently sell, all the time, regardless of what’s going on in media and going on in the world. This year has seen a big spike in sales, but yes, she’s absolutely an author whose works consistently sell.”

Is this jump in interest for an always popular author a sign of the political zeitgeist? David Boaz, an executive vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute, crunched some numbers from the book sales measurement service Bookscan and found that the biggest Atlas Shrugged sales spikes occurred not in reaction to government moves such as bailouts or stimulus spending but in close connection with major media mentions spelling out Rand’s contemporary relevance.

Writing on the Cato@Liberty blog, Boaz fingered a January 9 Wall Street Journal essay by Stephen Moore as the turning point. “The sales in late 2008 are very similar to those in 2007, with a Christmas bump that was higher in 2008,” Boaz wrote. “But sales started to diverge after January 9, suggesting that it was in fact the Wall Street Journal essay that kicked them into high gear.” An “even bigger peak in early March,” he argued, may be “a case of self-fulfilling prophecy and the accumulating effects of media buzz. [The Ayn Rand Institute] put out its press release about soaring sales on February 23.”

Cultural heat is often generated not spontaneously at the individual level but by public discussion. Rand’s publisher Welsh agrees: “The media coverage has driven the consumer to seek these books out more. Media coverage and media mentions are really what’s driving the sales.”

In the gold ribbon of buzzworthiness that is Hollywood, life has been pulsing again in the decades-long saga of getting Atlas Shrugged filmed. . . . In Atlas Shrugged, mystery man John Galt persuades people of great ability and original thought in every important field of business, science, and the arts to “go on strike” from society. They are encouraged by Galt, in Randian parlance, to “remove the sanction of the victim” from a world ruined by overgoverning altruists. These “Atlases” retreat to a rationalist libertarian paradise hidden in Colorado, known affectionately as Galt’s Gulch. In March 2009, popular right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin (who picked up the idea from another blogger, Helen Smith) started reporting anecdotes of Americans “Going Galt,” mostly by keeping their businesses or incomes from growing enough to enter a higher tax bracket.

. . .

Another development marking 2009 as a year of unusual Rand interest is the publication of two serious biographies of her by scholars who are not Objectivists. One is Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford University Press), by the University of Virginia historian Jennifer Burns; the other is Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Nan Talese), by Anne Heller, formerly a fiction editor at Esquire. (See “Ready for Her Close-Up,” page 60.)

Both authors say it’s merely fortuitous that their books have been preceded by a wave of press about Rand. Each tells me she was initially a little nervous about her controversial and much-derided subject. But they discovered that both academia and the New York literary community were filled with curiosity about Rand, if not love for her philosophy and prose.

. . . But now that the Rand revival story is linking Atlas Shrugged with the contemporary wave of anti-Obama/anti–big government thinking, Burns says, “Atlas is being rebranded more explicitly as a bible of right-wing America. Maybe in the future people will come to that book with that association locked in.” If that happens, the current mania may end up making Rand’s books less appealing, not more.

Heller, the former fiction editor, admires Rand’s command of the 19th-century Dickensian epic melodrama, which was rooted in passionate concerns about society and economics. She notes in the current context that “as Ludwig Von Mises said, Rand writes about bureaucrats better than anyone else. That kind of smarminess of bureaucratic-speak— ‘we’re doing this for your own good’—is very much in evidence these days.” As Asness of AQR Capital Management says, “We still don’t know if Rand’s heroes are realistic. We can debate that. But I’d say these days that the jury is in that her villains are pretty realistic.”

For Rand’s popularity to achieve political traction, Randism will have to move beyond the strange preoccupation of a few politicians and the full-time passion of two specialist think tanks. Her ideas will need to become the guiding principle for a significant voting bloc or politically active movement. And that is a difficult problem for Objectivism, which as an organized movement never managed to convert the millions of cash-paying Rand customers into active “radicals for capitalism,” to use the author’s own self-description.

. . .

When you look at the 2009 revival, it seems as if the Republican Party or the right wing broadly conceived would be the natural political home for Rand. The few politicians who talk her up are Republicans. But dating back to National Review’s attack on Atlas Shrugged in 1957, the intellectual gatekeepers of the conservative movement have mistrusted or even hated Rand.

. . .

Still, the Atlas Society’s Hudgins perceived signs of a more Randian right at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a modal gathering of young right-wing activists. “Of 1,757 respondents,” Hudgins wrote in a March essay at the Atlas Society’s website about a poll of conference attendees, “a whopping 74 percent said their most important goal was ‘to promote individual freedom by reducing the size and scope of government and its intrusion into the lives of its citizens.’ Only 15 percent answered ‘to promote traditional values by protecting marriage and protecting the unborn.’ And 10 percent at most wanted ‘to secure and guarantee American safety at home and abroad regardless of the cost or the size of government.’ ”

Rep. Ryan thinks the GOP needs to embrace Rand’s particular approach to politics—not merely stressing the practical benefits of freedom but arguing for its moral necessity. “We have an opportunity,” he says, “to make a choice clearly once and for all in the next two elections, and we owe it to the American people to give them a clear choice: Do you want a collectivist welfare state or do you want to get back to being a free market? We need to make a moral, not just practical or statistical, case.” Ryan admits he’s not sure the Republican Party as a whole is ready to make that argument with Rand’s uncompromising passion.

Whatever parallels one can detect between Atlas Shrugged and the current political moment, they are surely not precise. Statist nightmares that afflicted the America of the novel have not afflicted ours. Obama may be managing General Motors, and Goldman Sachs may be thriving through political pull, but nothing like the book’s “Directive 10-289,” which essentially nationalizes the entire economy and freezes everyone in his occupation, has been proposed.

Rand knew, and most of her fans knew, that her point was not to be literally prescient. Rand adored high drama and outrageous gestures, and she delighted in depicting the evil end points where she thought her intellectual enemies’ premises and beliefs would lead.

Political relevance for Rand’s work—translating the message of Atlas Shrugged into something useful in everyday life—is tricky. The Atlas Shrugged devotee who wants to change the world might note with disquiet that in the novel’s world, nothing got better until everything collapsed, with Eddie Willers, Rand’s stand-in for the average right-thinking, good-hearted, but not superbright American, weeping before a stalled train beneath an uncaring night sky.

Rand started as a novelist, and it is as a novelist that she still has the most effect on Americans’ lives. How the hundreds of thousands reading Rand for the first time this year will react to her will be personal, variable, and difficult to quantify; these readers probably will not end up propagating a new wave of small-government politics.

As Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead illustrated, lives worth living and loving can, and ultimately must, be forged in a world whose political and philosophical powers are opposed to individuality and liberty. In a society of ever-growing government where each individual’s ability to move the levers of political power is vanishingly small, that part of Rand’s message will remain the most relevant.

From Author’s Foreward – written April, 1946 – to new edition of Anthem – This story was written in 1937:

“”Social gains,” “social aims,” “social objectives” [and now, “social justice”] have become the daily bromides of our language. . . . There is no proposal outrageous enough but what its author can get a respectful hearing and approbation if he claims that in some undefined way it is for “the common good.

Some might think—though I don’t—that nine years ago [1937] there was some excuse for men not to see the direction in which the world was going. Today, [1946] the evidence is so blatant that no excuse can be claimed by anyone any longer. Those who refuse to see it now are neither blind nor innocent.

The greatest guilt today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default; that people who seek protection from the necessity of taking a stand, by refusing to admit to themselves the nature of which they are accepting; . . . [who] hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom, with no concrete meaning attached to the word; the people who believe that the content of ideas need not be examined, that principles need not be defined, and that facts can be eliminated by keeping one’s eyes shut. They expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps, to escape moral responsibility by wailing: “But I didn’t mean this!””