Despite all the graduation speeches enjoining us to “be passionate” about something, the experience of deep, passionate emotion is not an easy one to achieve, much less sustain. This talk offers guidance for achieving that rarified quality which Ayn Rand ascribed to one of Atlas Shrugged’s heroes — a “disciplined capacity to feel too deeply.” The talk by Gena Gorlin, a postdoctoral fellow at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, integrates tools from cognitive-behavioral therapy with insights from Rand’s theory of values, without assuming prior knowledge of either.
On February 8, the Ayn Rand Institute celebrated a significant milestone in its Free Books to Teachers program. Robert Begley, development specialist at ARI, presented a framed copy of ARI’s four-millionth free book, The Fountainhead, to Bayside High School English teacher Allan Weissmann. This is particularly noteworthy because 2018 happens to be the 75th anniversary of this best-selling Ayn Rand novel.
Ayn Rand was born this day — February 2 — in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905. Twenty-one years later, she escaped the Soviet Union and made the journey to America, never to return. Here is the transcript from a short video describing why.
In this talk delivered to law students, Steve Simpson, director of Legal Studies at the Ayn Rand Institute, discusses free speech on college campuses and analyzes current controversies.
What is happiness? And how can we achieve it? In this interview with Tara Smith, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, we learn about the link between philosophy and happiness; the need for purpose and self-esteem; how to discover what will make you happy; whether money will buy you happiness; and other topics.
Yaron Brook, chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute’s board of directors, delivered the Adam Smith Institute’s annual Ayn Rand Lecture on “The Morality of Finance” on November 13, 2017, in London, England.
At a free speech panel last summer, an audience member asked: “How would you apply the question of free speech to radical Islamic preachers like Anjem Choudary and people like that, who are calling for the downfall of the West and sometimes directly inciting violence? Should they be silenced? Or should they be free to say what they feel?”
