enthalpy

Sunday, June 07, 2009


Such a pity so little is known of Isabel Paterson:
Mention the name Isabel Paterson in such a gathering, and you’re likely to draw blank looks. For all the fervor that Rand inspires, little notice is paid to the woman who most inspired her.
Ayn Rand certainly gets more attention from college freshmen smoking clove cigarettes and trying to get laid, but Paterson isn't forgotten. I'll bet she wore this comment like a badge:
Such notions were contemptuously disregarded by the public intellectuals of the 1930s, men who considered Paterson a reactionary lady novelist, lacking the ability to comprehend big, hairy-chested Keynesian and Marxist theories. Edmund Wilson, America’s leading young literary critic, informed Paterson that she was “the last surviving person to believe in [the] quaint old notions on which the republic was founded.”
I'm kinda fond of this quote, too:
A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.



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