Quote: Ayn Rand on the Root of All Evil

• Shay
  May 13th, 2008 at 2:06 am

  Those darned self-sacrificing altruists?

• james h
  May 13th, 2008 at 2:10 am

  She doesn’t even get the quote right. It’s “love of money”.

• Alex Fear
  May 13th, 2008 at 2:36 am

  Enron?

• joe
  May 13th, 2008 at 4:06 am

  evil is an action (in this context)

  money is a noun

  so her quote makes no sense, much like everything else she ever wrote

• Pudifoot
  May 13th, 2008 at 5:00 am

  Joe: no, both are nouns.

  (from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/evil)
  Evil: n.
  1. The quality of being morally bad or wrong; wickedness.
  2. That which causes harm, misfortune, or destruction: a leader’s power to do both good and evil.
  3. An evil force, power, or personification.
  4. Something that is a cause or source of suffering, injury, or destruction: the social evils of poverty and injustice.

• MoonCake
  May 13th, 2008 at 6:34 am

  the ‘print’ button?

• Max Power
  May 13th, 2008 at 7:46 am

  Far as I know, the jews?

• brandon
  May 13th, 2008 at 8:05 am

  The root of all money is work. Work is the endeavor of the highest honor. Thus, money cannot be the root of all evil. The root of evil can be found in the desire to obtain things without the input of effort.

• DCer
  May 13th, 2008 at 8:26 am

  Ayn Rand misunderstands the quote, like she misunderstands humanity and economics.

• j.d.
  May 13th, 2008 at 8:51 am

  how can one misintepret a line they create?

  if you read the passage, maybe you’d understand.

  knee-jerk reactions are always funny to read, because it takes just a few comments to set them straight.

• qwhacker
  May 13th, 2008 at 9:54 am

  if anyone is interested in reading the whole passage that this was based on, flip to page 380 of Atlas Shrugged. The speech this comes from goes on for about 5 pages and is written extremely well

• smak
  May 13th, 2008 at 10:18 am

  >> how can one misintepret a line they create?

  Ayn Rand didn’t come up with the saying, “The LOVE of money is the root of all evil.” She’s simply misquoting it to further her warped Objectivist philosophy.

  @ qwhacker: I wouldn’t pick up ‘Atlas Shrugged’ again except to use it to prop open a door or window.

• uh durrrrr
  May 13th, 2008 at 10:45 am

  The Central Banks.

• Thomas
  May 13th, 2008 at 10:49 am

  Work is the root of all money…. work is evil…? I knew it!!

• Tempscire
  May 13th, 2008 at 12:59 pm

  The speech this comes from goes on for about 5 pages and is written extremely well

  Except she completely fails the whole “show, don’t tell” rule for writing. Whatever the agenda of a novel, an author should not ever have characters lecturing the reader for pages on end.

• Ali S.
  May 13th, 2008 at 2:06 pm

  After having read “Atlas Shrugged” all I can say is never have I been so disgusted by a book. And I freakin’ LOVE books! I couldn’t stand the end where she bloody well starts preaching to the reader. If it takes an author to get to a point using more than 200 pages of bad metaphors and lame examples and disregard of simple economics then that author isn’t doing something right. In this case trying to write a philosophical novel.

  Next time I want to make a person to stop reading or have a love for books I’ll give them my copy of “Atlas Shrugged”. Ugh. I need to go clean my palate now.

• Sid Morrison
  May 13th, 2008 at 2:47 pm

  I liked Atlas Shrugged a good bit, but I thought the hundred page speeches by the protagonist were a bit much. The characters in Atlas are really one-dimensional as well — you know who is good and who is bad when you first meet them and you don’t changed your mind much through the book. Her better work (IMO) is The Fountainhead, where the characters are a little more “grey”.

  Oh, I also get irked when people (including Rand) misquote the famous words of St. Paul which spoke of the LOVE of money, not money itelf. Money itself is neither good nor bad, it is merely a tool to efficiently trade goods and services.

• phoenix
  May 13th, 2008 at 3:20 pm

  @DCer - got it in one!

• lordunger
  May 13th, 2008 at 3:32 pm

  In my opinion, selfishness is the root of all evil. Loving money and getting money are products of selfishness.

• izzymeckler
  May 13th, 2008 at 4:49 pm

  Wrong^
  More Rand:
  “There is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level (see “The Objectivist Ethics”).

  “If it is true that what I mean by “selfishness” is not what is meant conventionally, then this is one of the worst indictments of altruism: it means that altruism permits no concept of a self-respecting, self-supporting man—a man who supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor others. It means that altruism permits no view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites—that it permits no concept of a benevolent co-existence among men—that it permits no concept of justice.”

• JET
  May 14th, 2008 at 5:19 pm

  Rand is a philosopher in the same sense that Paris Hilton is a musician. And anyone who thinks any of Rand’s ponderous and stilted prose is “written extremely well” needs to read more.

• Ron
  May 18th, 2008 at 12:43 am

  It is a shame when people make a sentence so hard to understand, maybe people need more reading to understand her books, and you cannot judge a “filosofo” by one quote. the sentence
  it is realy simple let me explain in first grade level
  “the love of money”, love is a good feeling, you make love a bad feeling, when you you love something bad!
  in this sentence the MONEY is the evil caracther. so money is the root of all evil, as would be Satan. The thing here is that they put the money as responsible of one evils acts, and it is not true. the love to succeed can not be evil. beign a parasite is evil, and anything you do is because you choose, not the money.the root of all evil is the love of beating others, instead of the desire of achieving…..

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