Other animals live by snatching what is around them — plucking fruit from a tree or gulping water from a stream. We don’t. We turn barren land into orchards. We build irrigation canals. We create what has never existed before: computers, airplanes, polio vaccines. What enables us to do this? Reason: systematic and deliberate logical thought. So the image [Ayn Rands] morality holds up to us to emulate, on whatever scale of ability we can achieve, is the thinker, the creator, the producer—the Aristotle, the Hugo, and the Carnegie. - To have their kind of devotion, rational and passionate, to your own mind and self — to your life and the incredible happiness that is possible within it — is for Rand the hallmark of morality. This is what she means by the virtue of selfishness.

Thus writes Onkar Ghate in the New Statesman. Read more in Objectivism. A philosophy for living?

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