Ayn Rand Interviewed By Phil Donahue

Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to present one of America's best selling authors. And you mentioned this woman's name. And you're in for a very vigorous conversation, especially among her untold uncounted numbers of followers. Here is philosopher Ayn Rand. Ms. Randy Gosh. Millions of Americans really were introduced to Ayn Rand in the Fountainhead 1943, Atlas Shrugged 1957, still selling worldwide. You are something.

I think so.

Well, you know, philosophy. You do think so.

Yeah.

You're tired of all this aw, shocked humility. That's phony. You think, huh?

That's right.

So I better get off my kick, huh?

Oh, you're not too humble.

You can see a little, a little.

Reluctant attempt that you make once in a while.

But I don't fool you?

Not too much.

What's your point? That that's a phoniness, isn't it? That enjoy whatever it is that's going on.

Yes. If you've honestly achieved it, and I know I have, and I think you have, then you should be proud of helps other people actually to know that you achieved something. It was worth it in your pleased with it rather than crawl around and say poor little me, where did we get into that?

Oh, shucks, it was nothing. I just hit a grand slam home run and the last of them to have a job to do, I went up there and I just swung at the ball and hit the bat. And you know, why do we do that? Why do we say I did it because I'm good and I work hard?

That's exactly it. Yeah.

How do you suppose we got into this phony baloney?

Oh, America. Because I think most men here are repressors. They hide their feelings particularly. Thank you. Now, I think most people have had the same experience or made the same observation that men in America think it's mark of strength never to show your feelings. And it becomes psychological repression, which is a very deadly psychology. It makes women terribly unhappy.

We seem, however, to allow for touching and everything else. I mean, what, what more wonderful embracing have we ever seen than the hockey players gave each other when they defeated Russia?

Oh, well, that's a rare exception.

Yeah, but it is, it is.

And it's proper. Why shouldn't it?

Of course it is. I'm not challenging that. I'm saying why do we have this? We have this dual set of behavior standards. One is don't show your feelings if you're hit by a pitch. I remember whenever the ball player would hit when I was a kid, he never went like that. You know, he'd run to first base and never touch it. And I think, oh, boy, is he strong. Now, I see that as your point, that it's a sort of tyranny that men are not supposed to express.

Yes. And it's sort of weakness. It's not strength. Because the strong man doesn't mind showing his feelings. Unhappy once. Or pain or enthusiasm or pride. But in trying to appear strong, most men lose the pleasure of being boastful. I don't mean boastful. I mean legitimately acknowledge their own achievement and that they take pleasure in it.

They take pleasure in not acknowledging their own achievement, you're saying no.

They're afraid to admit that they enjoy acknowledging their own achievements. So what?

Why is that important? I'm not sure I understand the consequence of this suppressed.

Why? Which are you asking me? Why is it important? Yeah.

For example, let's talk about the president for a moment. If I'm understanding you, one of the points you'd like to make is that you want to see a president joyful at victory, able to, if not, jump up and down, manifest his joy.

Huh? Yes, sir.

Spare you the toughest. A person who goes through the leadership role never smiling.

Huh? That wouldn't quite apply to the present president. No.

No, it wouldn't. So you must be encouraged by Mr. Carter's response to his own feelings. I see. I think his smile is genuine, don't you?

No, I think. I think it's conditioned. He. Now, if you watch him, he. He smiles when he's saying something serious. And it's almost like a nervous reaction, you know, he just smiles. Oh, my God. I forgot that I'm on tv.

Well, that's all right. Well, don't forget you're on tv.

No, but he is not a strong personality, nor is he showing genuine emotion. I don't think he has any ideas, and if so, he has no feelings. Okay.

Isn't this a little dangerous, though, analyzing people via television? I mean, I don't know if I'd want you out there talking about me on the basis of what you see on television.

Oh, you wouldn't regret it. But I think you're right to some extent. I shouldn't go into psychology of public figures. Yeah. Because only that only they and their psychologists can know the full truth. But, you know, television is very revealing.

Say your what?

Television is very revealing. You can tell a lot about a person.

You can?

Oh, yes. More than in a personal encounter.

I don't think you can tell a lot on the basis of one. One Appearance, actually.

Do you? No.

And also I think it's hard to read people who are in actor roles who are abiding by a script and the discipline of another creative person. But I do agree. I think if you watch a person on a talk show, for example, over any period of time, you get to know them, don't you?

I think so, yeah.

I read an article about an interview that Jerry Schwartz of the Atlanta Constitution wrote in which you said you were all over the lot and you liked Charlie's Angels. Yes, but you. Because why?

Because it's the only romantic television show today. It's not realistic, it's not about the gutter, it's not about the half wit retarded children and all the other kind of shows today. It's about three attractive girls doing impossible things. And because they're impossible, that's what makes it interesting. It shows three young girls who are better than so called real life. Yeah.

And you like.

That's a romantic school of literature.

You want art to be romantic, don't you?

Oh, certainly.

You're not crazy then about art which.

Reflects life, not the life of the moment. Well, I want ads that reflect life, long range.

All right. You're an Aristotelian. You're an Aristotle devotee more than a Plato.

Oh, God. Yes.

I'd be happy to tell you why, but we just don't have time. I don't mean to be.

I can tell you in one sentence.

Okay, good.

Because he is a defender, upholder and advocate of reason.

Aristotle.

Aristotle and the positive logic. Plato is the opposite.

Yeah. Translating some of your many writings into every day. Let's see if we just can't get up. Let me break here just a moment. Can I stay up here for just another break? And then I promise we'll have a chance. We're in Chicago with Ayn Rand, the philosopher. Objectivism. You've heard of that. Many of you have read her works and have. There are. There are countless people who say their lives have been changed after reading Ms. Rand's work. What do you think? We hope you'll join us.

Thank you.

This is Ayn Rand, and we're talking about her and her philosophy, her writings. And this is to do really grave injustice to a person of such depth and insight. So we're going to try our best, poor as it is, to at least expose those of you who haven't had a chance to read her work to where she stands philosophically and what her philosophies are, what her philosophy is. Okay, how do we Start. You don't like altruists?

I disapprove of them. I regard them as evil do gooders.

Lord save me from the do gooders.

I don't like those popular expressions that's too narrow and too political.

Okay, but what's bad about the person who wants to help other people to begin with?

That's the big mistake. People can want to help other people properly and with very good reasons, but that isn't altruism. Altruism doesn't mean merely helping people. It means sacrificing yourself to others. Placing the interests of others above your own. Is the self sacrificing person who is an altruist?

Yeah, what's wrong with that?

What's wrong with committing suicide? What's wrong with giving up life? And why is the happiness of another person important and good, but not your own? Why are you always the outsider and the sacrificial animal? For a good relationship there should be no victims, no sacrifices.

Okay, so that in a relationship, for example, a man and woman will take talk about the heterosexual world for a moment. To sacrifice for your loved one is in many cases then a misnomer. What you're really doing is tell me what you mean.

What I mean by sacrifice and what is generally meant is to give up some value which is important to you for something else which is a lesser value or a non value. That's sacrifice.

And you don't approve of that?

No, I don't. Now, if you love your husband or wife and you have to, let us say, select between spending money for your spouse if he's ill, or going to a nightclub, it's not a sacrifice to spend money for your spouse if he or she is your value. That is what you want to do. But if you let, for instance, your husband die in order to save the neighbor's husband or your wife, that would be altruism. If you reject or pass up something which is or someone who is valuable to you and in favor of somebody who is neutral, stranger, or even worse, an enemy. If you sacrifice a friend for an enemy, that's altruism. And the issue there is simply watch the hierarchy of values. If something that is important to you requires a great deal of effort from you, that's not sacrifice. But if you give up your career because you want your competitor arrival to be more successful, that would be hideous, a very evil sacrifice.

I'm trying to figure out how this applies to every day. You know, you know, if you don't, you know, if your wife wants you to go to the A and P and you don't want to go, but you sacrifice because it's for the good of the family. Is that okay with you?

Perfectly okay.

But what if you're filled with resentment as you go wondering why? How come you're always there?

Oh well, if that's true, that it's unfair, and if it's not, not your understanding with your husband, but he imposes this on you, then it's perfectly all right to resent it. And properly you should raise the issue and decide what you want to do.

Yeah, well, I don't understand why this is important. What are the consequences of the traditional notion that we've got here in the western world that sacrifice is what love is all about.

Do you want the quickest examples that comes to my mind? The newest proposals of having special millions spent on children and on the handicapped, including those so called kneeling buses. It's the attempt to bring everybody to the level of the handicapped. And if it's merely an issue of physical handicap, like a broken leg, which doesn't affect the mind, that would be a little more excusable. So I don't believe that such privileges should be granted to any group. But it includes the mentally retarded, which is the sub normal. The children who are unable to learn. So that at the end of spending thousands or millions of taxpayers money, you're left with a half idiot who may learn to read and write. May. On the other hand, there are no special schools or very very few for gifted children. And to pass up the gifted on whom all our lives depend, if it weren't for intelligent people read Atlas Shard. What would happen to us without the better mind who are able to survive and who carry the weight of everybody else. Yet we don't spend any money on them. We do every well.

The applause is for your call for more society energy directed at the accommodation of gifted people.

I hope so.

Okay, but.

But not government spending. However, so long as you support the ungifted, you owe your first priorities to the gifted.

But what in the Ayn Rand civil context would be appropriate societal measures to accommodate the ungifted?

Their own parents a chance to give their parents to earn money. If however, their parents are poor and cannot assume it's a big heavy burden, then you can appeal to private charity, as it was always done before welfare statism in this country you want private.

Charity as well for the gifted?

If necessary. They usually in a free society, they won't need it, they'll make their own way. Just so you don't stop them. But private charity cannot be done by means of tax collection, which means by fort. Private charity is up to you. And if it's a worthy cause that is abnormal child who certainly cannot help him, it's perfectly all right to help him, but not at the sacrifice of your own child.

You'd probably like to get rid of hew then.

Oh, certain. Almost certainly much more than that. I'd like to get rid of a.

Lot of the government. Huh?

Everything except the basic duties of the government, which is police, law courts, armed forces.

You want less government? Well, everybody says that. It's a little hard to put that into effect when we've got a company, a country that has such maldistribution of wealth. You give me that, huh? Too few rich, too many poor.

I will give you part of that. Because if there is a maldistribution, it's to those who have political pool. If some of your money is made with government help and government favoritism, then I grant you that is unfair and improper and unjust. But if you made it yourself in free competition enough people want to pay you for your services or your product, then you should keep all of it. Why shouldn't you? You made it all right.

Okay. You. You also think if. If the Middle Eastern countries want to charge hold us up for the oil at $5 a barrel or a gallon. Excuse me, $5. Will that day ever be banned? They ought to be able to do it. It's their oil. Is that your point?

No, my point is we should not have permitted altruistically to all those nations to nationalize what we built for them. They took. They took our oil.

Well, what do you mean? It's not our oil. It's not our. We don't own. We don't own Saudi Arabia.

They do. We own by contract, right, the installations which we devised to begin with, and we help them to build.

But it sounds like you're saying because we exported our technology, therefore they. Oh, that sounds like the altruism that you condemned a moment ago.

How? Altruism is the unearned. And this we earned and they nationalized from us. They have no right to their soil if they do nothing with it. Well, rights are not involved in those primitive societies. But they make a deal with us. They want to bring us in to develop their oil, and then they try to exploit and to literally murder us by means of that oil. That is unforgivable crime.

They would argue that. I mean, some in the Middle east would argue that. And it's first of all, it's their oil. They're grateful for whatever technology we were able to share with them. But they will claim that they paid for that they responded by presenting us with monies that were appropriate to the services we tendered them, and that let's not expect any favors for them. And that the world markets of laws of supply and demand should determine what the price of oil is.

They wouldn't be in a position of monopolies that they have today if we hadn't calmly agreed to let them nationalize.

Okay, then that's our problem. Then. We should have been more foresighted when we.

Oh, certainly.

All right. Well, why should we make them pay now for what we failed to put into our contract with them?

We're not making them pay.

Well, we are if we're insisting on getting oil at a cheaper price.

We really bargain and give in every time. And in a proper society, a government would never let it come that far. But let me answer one point you made that. Is there oil? No, it isn't. It was there for centuries and they didn't know what to do with it. We don't export our technology. We export our minds and our knowledge, without which they couldn't exist. And they admit it. They nationalized oil in a lot of those countries and then won the Americans or a few Europeans to come and help them run it. They can't even run the oil industry after they've copied everything from us. It can't be done.

You're so.

They're expropriating.

Okay, I just want to get this in before we break. You're an atheist.

Yes. I could do the same to you, you know, Since you're the host. I won't say it, but in other circumstances, I would say I don't approve of religion. I recognize your right to it.

You don't approve of religion because.

Because it's mystical, because it's based on faith, not on reason and facts.

So. So for you, but not for others. Okay. What do you care? Somebody wants to worship a Christmas tree or a telephone pole, that's their business.

I wouldn't stop them. Legally. I said, I grant them the right to believe anything they want, but I don't have to approve. And the question was, I would say, you know, exam. Yeah, but I would never pass any laws to stop them.

Yeah, you've got to allow that. You're not smart enough to know whether or not there's a God.

Yes, I am. And everybody curious is what smart enough? So it doesn't take much Intelligence. You know why? Because you're not called upon. I cannot be called upon to know a negative or to prove a negative. If there is a God and you prove it, that's fine. But you can't tell me you can't know that there isn't. I will say, yes, I know that there isn't because I've been given no evidence.

Well, but the fact that you've been given no evidence may mean you just haven't been in the right place at the right time. Well, I mean, it may mean that.

No, no, it could mean that about somebody else, but not about me.

Right. Okay.

Because I'm interested in this. Sure.

I honestly don't want to be theatrical about this and I'm not suggesting that you haven't been in this dialogue before, but I still have a lot of problems with. I think atheists are as arrogant as many of the so called Christians or religionists that you decry. I'm saying arrogantly in that you are here with your certainty saying there is no God and anybody who believes there is. There's almost a suggestion that you're foolish if you believe that there is. And I think that's a little arrogant and condescending if you.

No, I don't call it foolish. I would have. If you want me to tell the truth. I think it's a bad sign psychologically. It is a sign of a psychological weakness of a man who is afraid to stand on his own mind and his own responsibility. Because you see, the absence of proof has gone on for centuries. Every argument for the existence of God is incomplete, improper, and has been refuted. And people go on and on because they want to believe. Well, I regard it as evil to place your emotions, your desire above the evidence of what your mind knows. Okay.

And I regard it as intellectually lazy to look at the universe and to suggest, as you seem to be doing, that this is all some accident.

I didn't say that.

Well, how in the world did we get all this order? Aren't you impressed with that?

No, because order is only in good cases in the minds of your scientists who are able to understand some part of it. But there isn't an artificial order in the universe and it's not chance. What would be the alternative? Nature that the universe, and remember, the universe is everything that exists, has always been here. Because you cannot discuss or know anything about what was here before anything existed. A zero.

The question's absurd.

Doesn't exist.

The question is absurd. What was here before there was something here.

Exactly.

If There was something here before. There was something here, then there was something there already.

Exactly.

And then we have to ask what was there first.

That's right.

All right. So all I'm asking, Ms. Rand, is.

One thing, but that's what you're doing with the idea of God. Speaking philosophically. True. You say you need someone to explain the order, but what would you then have to explain? God. You have to take what exists as a fact and you start with what exists and you see how much you can learn about it.

Aren't you really filled with wonder when you look up at the stars?

No. And I don't like to look at them. I love this earth. You know when I'm filled with wonder? When I look at skyscrapers, at the man made, at what men were able. Able to achieve on their own, unaided so called mind without the help of faith, desires or any sort of mischief.

You know what you see in those skyscrapers?

What?

Lonely people with in baskets and out baskets and dead end jobs and no creative challenge. And bosses who don't appreciate what they're doing. And underpaid exploitation on the part of the many, many people who go in like cattle, filing into these ecological disasters that let too much heat into the.

All right, let me ask you. Would any human being, even a basket case, be better off in Iran or in Soviet Russia?

Oh, well, no, of course not. But maybe.

Wait. But the people who made what I see when I see the skyscrapers is the men who devised them. The Howard dork in the Fountainhead. The people who had the ability to bring us that far away from primitive jungles. Now that's the achievement. And observe in this country, the poorest, most handicapped person is better off than a fully abled man almost everywhere else in the world.

You were born, I should say just in tsarist Russia. 19 something.

1905.

You're 75 years old.

Okay.

You. You.

Thank you.

Didn't your people. Didn't your family flee the rough the Russian Revolution? No, they didn't. You fleet in the 20s, then you left in the 20s.

I left in 1926 alone.

All right, what did you leave in fear? Or do you have childhood memories of the.

In fear of what? Of Russia?

Yeah.

In complete loathing. Loathing for the whole country and including the tsarist. It is the ugliest and incidentally most mystical country on earth.

But they're the ones that decry atheism. They're singing your song.

Huh? Oh, no, I'm sorry.

Decry Christianity. I'm sorry. Describe religion.

Is What I meant to say, they really don't. They have a materialistic mysticism of their own. Because if the mystics, the religionist people tell you the mind, they don't speak of the mind, but usually the soul is the only thing of value about you. The body is evil.

The Russians say.

The Russians say no. I said the religions say no.

Yes, they do. Yes.

And the Russians will say no. There isn't such a thing as a soul or mind. There's only your body. It's materialism. They believe that you're not a man but a collection of atoms and give.

That body to the state for the collective effort of the.

That's right. For the good of the whole, and sacrifice to the state and whoever says it is or wants to be the state.

Ayn Rand will be back in a moment.

I was interested in your remarks on special education and particularly on gifted education. We in the public schools can identify gifted children. We can categorize their strengths and their needs, but we don't have the dollars to do what needs to be done. What, in your opinion, is our society's responsibility to these children who will be.

Our leaders to begin with? I don't believe that society has any responsibility towards anyone, neither the future leaders nor the future victims. Society has nothing to do, properly speaking, with the life of any one person, except to keep out of his way and give him a chance. In a proper, that is, totally free society, nothing will be done for the gifted except voluntarily if his parents are poor. And the general trend of the society is not towards helping the ungifted, it's not altruistic. Then private individuals and free institutions will help him if his parents are poor. But in every society, predominantly, all that the gifted child needs is some decent, rational education instead of the boredom that makes them give up school today. Because a lot of the gifted children, you know, are drop out because they're bored in a class devised for less gifted children and just leave them alone and preach the ideas that human abilities value.

When you say that society has no responsibility here, I think individuals have a responsibility to themselves. Is that it?

I don't like the word responsibility involved here.

All right, well, what should he say then? Help me do what I wish to do. Is that your point, that the more.

No, do what I rationally think is right according to the right morality and help others if you can, but not as a primary obligation. And now, in regard to society, there is no such thing as society. You know, it's all of us. Now, how can we have obligations which we didn't undertake. See, the parents of a child would have obligations for him up to a certain age since they brought him into the world. But they can't do what is impossible to them. So it doesn't mean that they can at any moment throw the burden on the rest of us. We're society, everybody's society, and we can't have unearned obligations and unchosen obligations.

My husband and I got married because of you. I just wanted you to know that we met and were the only two people we could find that liked your works and gravitated toward each other.

I was wondering, that was a long time ago.

A long time ago when no one. You weren't very popular at the time.

I was wondering, without being lengthy about it, what attracted you to misring? I mean, what did you like about.

I liked the idea of not being ashamed to be proud of what I am and who I am. And that's basically it.

You feel there's pressures in today's society?

I think there's a great deal of pressure.

Isn't American chauvinism one of the issues that we all have to look at and examine in terms of what it may lead us to do that may not be in our own long term best interest? In other words, we are accused of being breast beaters who never can error.

I really don't see that as a problem. I see as a problem what she was talking about in Iran where we have the technology, the intelligence and everything else, give it to everybody else and then all of a sudden we turn out to be the bad guys. Where is the justice?

You agree?

Do I agree with the speaker? Oh, yes, completely. But what was your question?

My question was. My question is a frivolous one of what do you think of the architecture in Chicago after writing the Fountainhead and studying, I'm sure much.

I haven't been in Chicago for years, so I can answer only that I love the early Frank Lloyd Wright buildings which there are several in Chicago and in your suburbs and the early Sullivan buildings which I hope are preserved and as a landmark. But I haven't seen any new buildings for 10 years.

You must see our skyline. There's another book down there.

Oh, pleasure.

We'll be back with Irand in just a moment.

Yes, Ms. Rand. I was one of those people who belonged to your cult where we were devouring your books and I just wanted to say that as I matured, I am glad that I was able to differentiate with your philosophy last year.

Do you want to create an Incident? No, pass it up. I am not a cult. All right.

No, I didn't mean that. I just meant that we admired your work and still do in many ways. But I'm glad now that as the emphasis today, as everyone talks of the Me Society, I have different feelings, thinking that there are many parts of your philosophies that do emphasize and create another me Society.

And what's wrong with that?

Well, I just feel that. I know Ms. Rand does not like the word responsibility, but as I matured, I became more responsible. I feel and I realize that there is another world around me other than just myself and my family, and I don't.

And if I didn't, why would I be here or speaking to you at all? And why would I write?

No, I don't disagree with that.

Thank you.

And I realize that. But I also feel that there are so many things that in many ways you're trying to create an elitist society. And today that just is not practical.

What has she said that makes.

If you want. Want to spread your views in today's society, you have every opportunity, more than you can count. Why come here and take advantage of my show and of people who came here to see and hear me, not the leaders who put responsibility on your shoulder. You want responsibility? Go and practice it. But you're not going to force any responsibility on me, and certainly not.

But she's. She has to be able to. To share with you her opinion, however differing it may be from. Because I know you don't mean to and I know we've been here before. Do you feel some sense of deja vu with this?

A little.

You. When you say that, you sound intolerant of those who would dissent from your position.

No. There is a distinction that has been very okay, but intentionally modeled. I do not, and I've said repeatedly, I don't want to interfere with anyone or force anything on them. You have to make those distinctions voluntarily and yourself. The distinction is, let the whole world disagree with me if it wants to. Doesn't mean that if I want to be tolerant, I will change my ideas. I want to hold only my ideas. I don't approve of those who preach the opposite. And I don't think that the freedom to utter nonsense is the first freedom. The freedom is your right to your life.

I don't think you want the responsibility of deciding what in every case is nonsense.

No, my policy is I don't deal with those who disagree. All right, well, they don't agree, fine. They shouldn't deal with me.

But just think of the fun you're missing. I mean, you're.

That's different. That depends on your idea of fun.

Oh. A good, vigorous exchange of views between two people who care and have differing positions is one of the most instructive things that can happen in a living room or on television.

I would love to see an honorable adversary, but I've stopped hoping for it.

But that's an arrogant position. What you're saying is all those who disagree with me are not honorable. That's what you're saying.

Not honorable in their ideas. I don't judge him personally or psychologically.

Honorable is a judgment. It's the worst thing.

I have to know something about a person's attitude and knowledge in regard to his or her ideas before I say.

Report on everybody who would disagree with me.

Wait a moment.

But can't we deal with the issues right at the surface? She made a comment. Right at the surface, she made a comment that. That she disagreed.

You know, I'm not doing it to flatter you, but I think you're a good adversary. He'll ask intelligent questions you'll show when you disagree. But you focused on ideas. So am I.

So was she. No, she was talking about your ideas, and she all. She said that she's parted from some of your writings. Hey, show me a person who's universally beloved, and I'll show you a person who isn't doing anything.

No, if she's parking from my writings, that's her loss, not mine. But why announce it to me?

Okay, but this is the kind of. We have to be able to talk about this without being. Without rancor, huh?

I don't think I'm very rankers right now.

No, no, no, not yet.

You can't tell.

Okay. Your position is desperately close to the. To the dictator who says, if you disagree with me, you are not honorable. I will not deal with you, and I may send the savak after you. That's the next thing.

Now, that is you.

I wouldn't suggest. You would do that. I suggest the beginning of an attitude.

That brings you means that if you are opposed to a dictator, you say, well, reality is one thing for you, but it's another thing for me. Let's all be guided by our feelings and not by the evidence of reality.

Okay, the problem with the conversation is you and I would have to both choose a dictator for us to be equally comfortable in discussing it. I mean, your definition of a dictator may be different than mine, or vice versa.

My definition is very simple and objective. Anyone who will enforce any idea or prejudice by physical force? Anyone who initiates the use of force against another human being in that instant is acting like a dictator. And if he establishes that as a political system and as a dictatorship. But I'm the arch enemy of physical force. I'm for freedom of the mind and for bringing people to your ideas by persuasion, not by force.

Could you bring your moral perceptions and principles to a meeting in 1917, 1920, 22, to assassinate the Tsar?

Why assassination to him? He fell, you know, by a bloodless.

You don't knew that.

You.

You didn't know that at the time. You're armchair quarterbacking now. I'm asking you in the Dietrich Bonhoeffer sense, could you plot to overthrow a person that you thought was obviously in your mind, denying civil rights to other.

People, Plot against him? Certainly. I always said you should. You have the moral right to retaliate with force if someone imposes force on you.

So you're for self defense.

Oh, yes, but not murder. And that is a profound difference.

But when the underground people in Germany started meeting and saying, let's knock off Hitler, that's morally acceptable.

Oh, totally.

Just checking.

In view of what you've just said.

I wonder if you have an opinion.

About the Shah of Iran. Do you think his actions in leaving Iran and finding, you know, a home somewhere else, would that be an adversary of your philosophy? That he did what he thought was morally right?

No, because his philosophy was pretty dictatorial. I don't approve of him at all. I don't admire him. But if this country gives refuge to communists and ex Nazis and every kind of refugee, they should have given him refuge. I don't see why not. Unless they decided by them in the government that it's not to our interest. If somebody threatens this country and his ideas are so evil that will create damage in this country, then you have the right properly to refuse him. But that doesn't justify a dinky, miserable, little savage country that exists only on the proceeds of. Of the oil they rubbed from us, dictating our internal policy, because that is what they're doing. They're telling us whom we can admit and whom we can't admit. By what right.

I had a problem with understanding Ms. Rand's philosophy at the beginning or earlier in the show. She said that she only believed in a romantic type of art and didn't believe in things that were based on realism.

She didn't think that. You don't think art should necessarily reflect life, especially life as it is today.

Exactly. And I recognize other schools of art, only I don't like them. I prefer it's romanticism.

I just found that a little bit contradictory with then when she said in terms of religion that she didn't believe in religion as we do because it's not based on realism, as she said, and more mysticism.

You're mixing categories. The issue of religion is metaphysical. It's so in nature, in reality. Now art is not metaphysics. It's not there without men. Art is man made. It's a product of man. And when it's a product of man, you don't have to copy it. You don't have to say this is a fact because 10 men did it that way. You create your own art or you like a school of which there's only one representative. Anything that is man made is open to reason, but not by the same kind of mental process as metaphysical or scientific factual issues. For instance, here I can only recommend that you read my book the Romantic Manifesto, because I couldn't cover it in a few minutes. The reasons why I can demonstrate to you that romanticism is the best school of art, the best, most justifiable, but not the only one.

Over here, please.

First I would like to say that I am a believer. Praise God. In God. And what I want to know from Mrs. Rand is that why is it so hard to accept gratitude?

You think it is?

No, I think it's a very pleasant emotion to accept. Gratitude?

Yes.

Well, in what way do you classify me with that question? Does it mean that you're a weak person?

You know, like if a person tell you thank you for something that you have done for them and you say.

Well, you know, if you mean that I and other people should say if they've achieved something, thank God, it's God who helped me to do it. But if you make a mistake, well then it's my own evil fault. You see what it does to your self esteem. And I think it is very, very dangerous and improper to ascribe your own achievement to somebody else. You should be proud, as I said at the beginning, of something which you actually achieved. Don't share credit for that. Don't give it away.

Ms. Rand, I'd like to say that in past years I read your books and I enjoyed the excitement and especially the settings of them which were far removed from my life. Are you working on any new ones? Especially on the oil monopolies or have your writings changed that much?

No, I'm not writing at present. I'm in a very sad period of my life but I'll recover.

You have recently been widowed and yes you're dealing now with the does this emotional impact of this kind of pain alter in any way your own feeling philosophy?

No. It only alter my position regard to the world which is that I lost my top value. I'm not too intimidated interested in anything else but I'll survive it because I do love the world in general and I do love ideas and I do love men. But my personal is a loss now.

Isn't there a temptation for you and I don't mean this to flip to suggest that you're not sincere in your writings to hope for a reunion with the person you love to look beyond the.

I ask myself just that seriously and I thought if I really believed it for five minutes I'd commit suicide immediately and I know that.

Would you get to him right away?

I would get to him, of course. I'll tell you more. I ask myself how would I feel if I think he's now on trial before God or St. Peter and I'm not with him?

The testifier to help him out.

Exactly. My first desire in that case would be to run to help him and tell how good he was.

But some of your statements maybe your husband just as soon not even know let God know that you know what I mean.

He was more of an atheist than I am. He was if there could be degrees.

My comment is offered with love. I hope you know that there's nothing flip about it because I know your pain is real and we share it with you and hope that you'll walk out of this woods soon.

I believe you. Thank you and you've really helped me. It's my first public appearance since and was sort of a test for myself and I thank you very much. I thank. I don't mind expressing gratitude.

So much for your visit with us.

I'd love to know what they're going.

To talk about on the way home in the car.

Wouldn't you?

Ms. Rand and I thank you and hope you have a nice day. Goodbye everybody.