The Return of the Primitive Quotes

“Now observe that in all the propaganda of the ecologists—amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for “harmony with nature”—there is no discussion of man’s needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision—i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears....

In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced civilizations, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without that alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus brought to man. The ecologists are the new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“The thinking child seeks equals; the conformist seeks protectors.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or “limited”) reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some authority.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“A thinking child cannot conform. Thought does not bow to authority.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“If a determined, disciplined gang of statists were to make an assault on the crumbling remnants of a mixed economy, boldly and explicitly proclaiming the collectivist tenets which the country had accepted by tacit default—what resistance would they encounter? The dispirited, demoralized, embittered majority would remain lethargically indifferent to any public event. And many would support the gang, at first, moved by a desperate, incoherent frustration, by a need to protest, not knowing fully against what, by a blind desire to strike out somehow at the suffocating hopelessness of the status quo.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“In the 1960s, college students forcibly occupied administration buildings, demanding courses in “black studies.” Today, every major university features full departments (and even some designated dormitories and cafeterias) for a variety of ethnic excogitations. Today, instead of violent sit-ins, there has been a quiet coup by “diversity committees,” whose authoritarian thought-police reign on campuses and who banish “politically incorrect” dissenters to the dungeons of re-education seminars.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“What Columbus felt when he landed in America, what the astronauts felt when they landed on the moon, is what a child feels when he discovers the earth, between the ages of two and seven.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“But, of course, it is not for their language that the tribalists are fighting: they are fighting to protect their level of awareness, their mental passivity, their obedience to the tribe, and their desire to ignore the existence of outsiders.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“The notion that one’s culture is superior to all others solely because it represents the traditions of one’s ancestors, is regarded as chauvinism if claimed by a majority—but as “ethnic” pride if claimed by a minority.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“So the advocacy of “ethnicity,” means racism plus tradition i.e., racism plus conformity i.e., racism plus staleness.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“Men who have found tbe right way of life do not seek to escape from awareness, to obliterate their consciousness, and to drug themselves out of existence. Drug addiction is the confession of an unbearable inner state.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“There are no solutions for the many contradictions inherent in the concept of “public property,” particularly when the property is directly concerned with the dissemination of ideas. This is one of the reasons why the rebels would choose a state university as their first battleground.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“The theoretical purpose of that grotesque absurdity is to establish a moral inversion: to make the initiation of force moral, and resistance to force immoral—and thus to obliterate the right of self-defense. The immediate practical purpose is to foster the activities of the lowest political breed: the provocateurs, who commit acts of force and place the blame on their victims.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“In real life, there is no such thing as a gradual descent from civilization to savagery. There is a crash—and no recovery, only the long, drawn-out agony of chaos, helplessness and random death, on a mass scale. There is no such thing as retrogressing “a little.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“Since nature does not endow all men with equal beauty or equal intelligence, and the faculty of volition leads men to make different choices, the egalitarians propose to abolish the “unfairness” of nature and of volition, and to establish universal equality in fact—in defiance of facts.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“No political system can establish universal rationality by law (or by force). But capitalism is the only system that functions in a way which rewards rationality and penalizes all forms of irrationality, including racism.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“There is only one antidote to racism: the philosophy of individualism and its politico-economic corollary, laissez-faire capitalism. Individualism regards man—every man—as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Individualism holds that a civilized society, or any form of association, cooperation or peaceful coexistence among men, can be achieved only on the basis of the recognition of individual rights—and that a group, as such, has no rights other than the individual rights of its members.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“It is fear that drives them to seek the warmth, the protection, the “safety” of a herd. When they speak of merging their selves into a “greater whole,” it is their fear that they hope to drown in the undemanding waves of unfastidious human bodies. And what they hope to fish out of that pool is the momentary illusion of an unearned personal significance.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“Why struggle to discover the world if you can make it become whatever you wish--by wishing?”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“It is impossible to be consumed by a single passion without knowing its nature, no matter what rationalizations one constructs to hide it from oneself.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“Or a child may conclude that the school will give him nothing, that he must learn on his own—which is the best conclusion to draw in the circumstances, except that it can lead him to a profound contempt for teachers, for other adults and, often, for all men (which is the road to subjectivism).”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“And someday the world will discover that without thought there can be no love.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

“A man has the free will to think or not. If he does not, he takes what he gets.”
― Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution