“The secret dread of modern intellectuals, liberals and conservatives alike, the unadmitted terror at the root of their anxiety, which all of their current irrationalities are intended to stave off and to disguise, is the unstated knowledge that Soviet Russia is the full, actual, literal, consistent embodiment of the morality of altruism, that Stalin did not corrupt a noble ideal, that this is the only way altruism has to be or can ever be practiced.”

— Ayn Rand , book Philosophy: Who Needs It

Source: Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982), p. 84.

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Ayn Rand 322

Russian-American novelist and philosopher 1905–1982

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