Following is some of Terry's favorite quotes from Ayn Rand

I’ve been asked by many people if I could give them my favorite quote from Ayn Rand. There are many, but among my favorite quotes are her definitions of “Envy/Hatred of the Good for Being Good” taken from The Ayn Rand Lexicon.

“Today, we live in an Age of Envy.

“ ‘Envy’ is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.

“Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves. . . . That emotion is: hatred of the good for being good.

“This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree. . . . Hatred of the good for being good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one’s own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.

“If a child wants to get good grades in school, but is unable or unwilling to achieve them and begins to hate the children who do, that is hatred of the good. If a man regards intelligence as a value, but is troubled by self-doubt and begins to hate the men he judges to be intelligent, that is hatred of the good.

“The nature of the particular values a man chooses to hold is not the primary factor in this issue (although irrational values may contribute a great deal to the formation of that emotion). The primary factor and distinguishing characteristic is an emotional mechanism set in reverse: a response of hatred, not toward human vices, but toward human virtues.

“To be Exact, the emotional mechanism is not set in reverse, but is set one way: its exponents do not experience love for evil men; their emotional range is limited to hatred or indifference. It is impossible to experience love, which is a response to values, when one’s automatized response to values is hatred”

(From “The Age of Envy,” The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution !971)

“Consider the full meaning of this attitude. Values are that which one acts to gain and/or keep. Values are a necessity of man’s survival, and wider: of any living organism’s survival. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action, and the successful pursuit of values is a precondition of remaining alive. Since nature does not provide man with an automatic knowledge of the code of values he requires, there are differences in codes which men accept and the goals they pursue. But consider the abstraction “value,” apart from the particular content of any given code, and ask yourself; What is the nature of a creature in which the sight of a value arouses hatred and the desire to destroy? In the most profound sense of the term, such a creature is a killer, not a physical, but a metaphysical one — it is not an enemy of your values, but of all values, it is an enemy of anything that enables men to survive, it is an enemy of life as such and of everything living.”

(Ibid.)

“They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself. . . . They are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they are after. This is a conspiracy against the mind, which means; against life and man.”

(For the New Intellectual 1961)

We have a perfect example of “Hatred of the Good for being Good” with the internet. Anyone familiar with it knows that the internet is infested with those consumed by a burning hatred of anything good. Instead of finding what they enjoy in life and enjoying it, they haunt the internet, devoting their lives to hate. Hiding under their cloak of anonymity, these cowards rant against anything and everything. What they hate most are values because values promote life. If you choose to think for yourself rather than submit to their dogmatic beliefs and dictatorial vents, they invariably turn to insults, abusive language, and threats. The style of a writer — even a writer on the internet — reveals that writer’s soul. Their own words betray their inner corruption. They seek not to discover and enjoy the good in life, but to make your life miserable. They hate that you enjoy anything in life. They hate the good for being good. When you come across the venom from these zeros, I hope you will remember this quote and know them for what they are.

This brings me to another of my favorite quotes, from The Book of Life in PHANTOM:

“Those who have come here to hate should leave now, for in their hatred they only betray themselves.”