As a cultural-intellectual power and a moral ideal, collectivism died in World War II. If we are still rolling in its direction, it is only by the inertia of a void and the momentum of disintegration. A social movement that began with the ponderous, brain-cracking, dialectical constructs of Hegel and Marx, and ends up with a horde of morally unwashed children stamping their foot and shrieking: "I want it now is through."
Ayn RandEvery movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation's troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.
Ayn RandRacism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a manโs genetic lineage-the notion that a manโs intellectual and characterologic al traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.
Ayn Rand