Business Pride - Powerful Motivation for Business

"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." - Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was born in Russia in 1905, but spent most of her life in America. Her best-known novels are The Fountainhead, made into a film starring Gary Cooper, and her greatest work, Atlas Shrugged, which placed second to the Bible in a Library of Congress survey of most influential books. Ayn Rand also wrote an extensive body of non-fiction to clarify her philosophical discoveries. There are now more than 50 universities in America with courses based on her philosophy, Objectivism.

Objectivism is first and foremost a philosophy of reason. It holds that the purpose of life is to achieve our own happiness by following our rational self-interest and holding reason, purpose and self-esteem as our highest values.

These values imply and require seven virtues: rationality, productiveness, pride, independence of thought, honesty, integrity and justice. For business examples of these virtues, see Enterprise Ethics

“[The professional businessman] is the great liberator, who in the short span of a century and a half has released men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence, has released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the pre-capitalist centuries and in which most of it still lives today in non-capitalistic countries.” - Ayn Rand

For more business quotations from Ayn Rand, click on Business Quotes

To be able to achieve our happiness, we need to have our rights (life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness) protected. This is the only valid function of government and so Objectivism upholds laissez-faire capitalism as the only moral political system.

Read more on Objectivism