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Wednesday, November 2, 2005 - 5:16pmSanction this postReply
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Taken from 33 presentations, of which 13 are Ford Hall Forums, these responses will delight and challenge anyone who admires the works of Ayn Rand.

I will not cite any of them here at first.  We can discuss them later when more people buy the book. Buying the book is prerequisite to joining in the discussion.

Compiler Robert Mayhew writes:
Ayn Rand was always a firsthand thinker.  She did not take with her into a lecture hall a set of pat, standard answers to questions -- for example, about the immorality of altruism or her opposition to Ronald Reagan.  Her answers always grew out of her general philosophy but also out of the context, which included the topic of her lecture, the nature of her audience, the attitude of the questioner, and even the era in which she was speaking (for example, the early sixties or late seveties).
I will say this.  The first thing I noticed is that this is a very public Ayn Rand -- by necessity; by definition.  She wrote fiction in order to read the kinds of stories she liked.  Her fiction is very private.  Her early non-fiction works were anthologies from the periodicals that were addressed to her admirers.  Unlike today's Usenet newsgroups, the Objectivist Newsletter did not get a lot of readers who believed just the opposite and were seeking to argue the obvious with the committed.  These Q&A sessions were different than that.  While the audiences were packed with admirers, hostile listeners could be expected. 

Rand was very well aware of the fact that she could not assume that her audience had read Galt's Speech with a highlighter in hand.  Therefore, her spoken words are at once illuminating and insightful -- and also provocative and challenging.  To me, reading these, I could see that what she was doing was planting seeds of thought. 

Buy the book and decide for yourself which of her ideas have taken root and blossomed.


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