Quotes from book
The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution
Ayn Rand

The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution is a 1971 collection of essays by the philosopher Ayn Rand, in which the author argues that religion, the New Left, and similar forces are irrational and harmful. Most of the essays originally appeared in The Objectivist. A revised edition appeared in 1975, and an expanded edition edited by Peter Schwartz was published in 1999 under the title Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.

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“There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.”

Ayn Rand book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Source: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 123

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“A crime is the violation of the right(s) of other men by force (or fraud). It is only the initiation of physical force against others- i. e., the recourse to violence- that can be classified as a crime in a free society (as distinguished from a civil wrong). Ideas, in a free society, are not a crime- and neither can they serve as the justification of a crime.”

Ayn Rand book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Source: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 99

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“Today, racism is regarded as a crime if practiced by a majority—but as an inalienable right if practiced by a minority.”

Ayn Rand book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Source: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 167

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“An Asian peasant who labors through all of his waking hours, with tools created in Biblical times—a South American aborigine who is devoured by piranha in a jungle stream—an African who is bitten by the tsetse fly—an Arab whose teeth are green with decay in his mouth—these do live with their 'natural environment,' but are scarcely able to appreciate its beauty. Try to tell a Chinese mother, whose child is dying of cholera: 'Should one do everything one can? Of course not.' Try to tell a Russian housewife, who trudges miles on foot in sub-zero weather in order to spend hours standing in line at a state store dispensing food rations, that America is defiled by shopping centers, expressways and family cars.”

Ayn Rand book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Source: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 88

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“…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…”

Ayn Rand book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Source: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 136

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“Contrary to the ecologists, nature does not stand still and does not maintain the kind of equilibrium that guarantees the survival of any particular species - least of all the survival of her greatest and most fragile product: man.”

Ayn Rand book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Source: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 134

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“By the same principle, the government may not give special leniency to the perpetrator of a crime, on the grounds of the nature of his ideas.”

Ayn Rand book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

Source: The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (1971), p. 99

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