References
[Editor’s notes are in blue.]
[01] A. Rand, “The Age of Envy” 10/7/7b [References of this form refer to The Objectivist Newsletter, or (after 1964) The Objectivist, in this case, volume 10, number 8, i.e., July 1971. The page numbers for the latter are those of the original format, not those in the bound volume. “The Age of Envy” appeared in two parts, the July and August issues.] & TNL 160 [Presumably James is referencing the book The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. However, the essay does not appear in that book, but rather in the expansion of that book, titled Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.]
MM... a man of achievement ... does not judge himself — or others — by a comparative standard. His attitude is not: "“I am better than you,” but: “I am good.”
AS [Atlas Shrugged] 93ww-94A [hardback]
MMThere was no boastfulness in his manner and consciousness, no thought of comparison. His attitude was not: “I can do it better than you,” but simply: “I can do it.” What me meant by doing was doing superlatively.
[02] AS 46qq-tt (52mm-pp) [paperback]
MMShe felt herself screaming silently, at times, for a glimpse of human ability, a single glimpse of clean, hard, radiant competence. She had fits of tortured longing for a friend or an enemy with a mind better than her own.
WIAR 72 [Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, Who Is Ayn Rand?; the reference is to the paperback edition (Paperback Library, 1964). The parallel reference in the hardback (Random House, 1962) is page 87.]
MMI decided to become a writer — not in order to save the world, nor to serve my fellow man — but for the simple, personal, selfish, egotistical happiness of creating the kind of man and events I could like, respect, and admire. I can bear to look around me levelly. I cannot bear to look down. I wanted to look up.
N. Branden, “The Psychology of Pleasure” 3/2/6h [Also, N. Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem (Bantam Books), p. 136)]
MMA man can seek the projection of the heroic, the intelligent, the efficacious ... he can seek the pleasure of admiration, of looking up to great values. Or he can seek the satisfaction of contemplating gossip-column varieties of the folks next door....
AS 339mm-nn (358q-qq)
MM“It’s so wonderful,” said Dr. Stadler, his voice low. “It’s so wonderful to see a great, new, crucial idea which is not mine!” ...
MM“Miss Taggart, do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It’s resentment of another man’s achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone’s work prove greater than their own — they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal — for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them — while you’d give a year of your life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don’t know that that world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors — hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom — the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don’t respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?”
MM“I’ve felt it all my life,” she said. It was an answer should not refuse him.
[03] AS 68ff-tt (65mm-66f)
MMShe felt the wish to find a moment’s joy outside, the wish to be held as a passive spectator by some work or sight of greatness. Not to make it, she thought, but to accept; not to begin, but to respond; not to create, but to admire; I need it to let me go on, she thought, because joy is one’s fuel.
MMShe had always been ... the motive power of her own happiness. For once, she wanted to feel herself carried by the power of someone else’s achievement. As men on a dark prairie liked to see the lighted windows of a train going past, her achievement, the sight of power and purpose that gave them reassurance in the midst of empty miles and night — so she wanted to feel it for a moment, a brief greeting, a single glimpse, just to wave her arm and say: Someone is going somewhere....
AS 360qq-uu (381 ll-pp)
MM[Quentin Daniels re-inventing the Galt Motor:]
MM“Miss Taggart,” he said in conclusion, “I don’t know how many years it will take me to solve this, if ever. But I know that if I spend the rest of my life on it and succeed, I will die satisfied.” He added, “There’s only one thing that I want more than to solve it: it’s to meet the man who has.”
AS 66y-z (63c-d)
MM[Eddie Willers:]
MM“You know, I’m not any kind of great man. I couldn’t have built that railroad.”
AS 426ff, mm-ss (453a, h-m)
MM“When you feel proud of the rail of the John Galt Line ... Did you want to see it used by men who could not equal the power of your mind, but who would equal your moral integrity — men such as Eddie Willers — who could never invent your Metal, but who would do their best, work as hard as you did, live by their own effort, and — riding on your rail, give a moment’s silent thanks to the man who gave them more than they could give him?”
MM“Yes,” said Reardon gently.
[04] A. Rand, “The Age of Envy” 10/7/1d, g, 2b, 4e [July 1971]
MM“Envy” is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify....
MMThat emotion is: hatred of the good for being good....
MMIf a man regards intelligence as a value, but is troubled by self-doubt and begins to hate the men he judges to be intelligent, that is hatred of the good....
MMIt does not desire the value: it desires the value’s destruction.
A. Rand, “The Age of Envy” 10/8/1c [August 1971] & TNL 170
MMTo understand the meaning and motives of egalitarianism, project it into the field of medicine. Suppose a doctor is called to help a man with a broken leg and, instead of setting it, proceeds to break the legs of ten other men, explaining that this would make the patient feel better; when all the men become crippled for life, the doctor advocates the passage of a law compelling everyone to walk on crutches — in order to make the cripples feel better and equalize the “unfairness” of nature.
AS 334bb-cc, oo, qq-yy (353p-q, aa, dd-kk)
MMShe had tried to find a scientist able to attempt the reconstruction of the motor.... The fourth [said:] “You know, Miss Taggart, I don’t think that such a motor should ever be made, even if somebody did learn how to make it. It would be so superior to anything we’ve got that it would be unfair to lesser scientists, because it would leave no field for their achievements and abilities. I don’t think that the strong should have the right to wound the self-esteem of the weak.” She had ordered him out of her office and had sat in incredulous horror before the fact that the most vicious statement she had ever heard had been uttered in a tone of moral righteousness.
AS 675a-h (725ii-pp)
MM[Ken Danagger:]
MM“Have you come to think that one man’s ability is a threat to another? ... Any man who’s afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat who’s in business where he doesn’t belong. To me — the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good.”
FH 281-2 [The Fountainhead; page number is to the 1971 Signet reprint.]
MMHe got up, walked over to her, and stood looking at the lights of the city below them.... And Ellsworth Toohey said softly:
MM“Look at it. A sublime achievement isn’t it? A heroic achievement. Think of the thousands who worked to create this and of the millions who profit by it. And it is said that but for the spirit of a dozen men, here and there down through the ages, but for a dozen men — less, perhaps — none of this would have been possible. And that might be true. If so, there are — again — two possible attitudes to take. We can say that those twelve were great benefactors, that we are all fed by the overflow of the magnificent wealth of their spirit, and that we are glad to accept it in gratitude and brotherhood. Or we can say that by the splendor of their achievement which we can neither equal not keep, those twelve has shown us what we are, that we do not want the free gifts of their grandeur, that a cave by an oozing swamp and a fire of sticks rubbed together are preferable to skyscrapers and neon lights — if the cave and the sticks are the limit of our own creative capacities. Of the two attitudes, Dominique, which would call the truly humanitarian one? Because, you see, I’m a humanitarian.”
[05] Who Is Ayn Rand? 129 [In the hardback, 161-62]
[06] A. Rand WTL 107 [We the Living, (Signet Books, 1959)]
[07] In justice to Islam, about which I know little, I add that I have not heard it from what I take to be a reliable source. I am using the story for illustrative purposes only. Let no reader conclude, on my testimony, that Moslem rug-makers do in fact follow this practice, or that if they do it is for this reason, or if it is, that they have correctly interpreted the teachings of their faith.
[08] A. Rand, “The Age of Envy” 10/7/8f, h-8a [July 1971] and TNL 161
MMIn primitive cultures (and even in ancient Greece) the appeasement [of evil] took the form of the belief that the gods resent human happiness or success, because these are the prerogatives of the gods to which men must not aspire. Hence the superstitious fear of acknowledging one’s good fortune....
MMMen create gods — and demons — in their own likeness; mystic fantasies, as a rule, are invented to explain some phenomenon for which men find no explanation. The notion of gods who are so malicious that they wish men to live in chronic misery, would not be conceived or believed unless men sensed all around them the presence of some inexplicable malevolence directed specifically at their personal happiness.
[09] St. Irenaeus (180), Adversus Haereses, 4:38:1 (p. 76)
MM[In this and the citations immediately following, the number in parenthesis after a writer’s name gives the approximate year of his writing, and he page number at the end gives the page in Henry Bettenson’s Early Christian Fathers. (???) [Oxford University Press, 1956; it is not clear to me what edition of Bettenson James is citing, probably a British edition. Therefore, I have supplied the parallel information in blue from the Oxford edition (American) I have just cited. In this case, Bettenson gives the reference as iv., xx. 4 on page 105.]
MMThere is one God, who by his Word and Wisdom made and ordered all things.... His Word is our Lord Jesus Christ who in these last times became man among men, that we might unite the end with the beginning, that is, Man with God. ...that man, taking to himself the Spirit of God, should pass to the glory of the Father.
MMSt. Iraenaeus (180), Adversus Haereses, 5 praef. ad fin. (p. 77) [p. 106]
MMOur Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, of his boundless love, became what we are that he might make us what he himself is.
MMOrigen (240), De Principiis, 3:4:1 (p. 193) [p. 273]
MMThe fact that after God has said, “Let us make man in our image and likeness,” the narrator goes on to say, “In the image of God he made him” and is silent about the likeness (Gen 1:26–27), indicates just this: that in his first creation man received the dignity of the image of God, but the fulfillment of the likeness is reserved for the final consummation; that is, that he himself should appropriate it by the eagerness of his own efforts, through the imitation of God having the possibility of perfection given him at the beginning by the dignity of the image, and then in the end, through the fulfillment of his works, should bring to perfect consummation the likeness of God.
MMOrigen (240), Contra Celsum, 3:28 ad fin. (p. 226) [p. 312]
MM... from Jesus began a weaving together of the divine and human nature in order that human nature, through fellowship with what is more divine, might become divine, not only in Jesus but also in all those who, besides believing in Jesus, take up the life which he taught; the life which leads everyone who lives according to the precepts of Jesus to friendship with God and fellowship with him.
MMSt. Athanasius (330), Contra Arianos, 1:42 (p. 279) [p. 384]
MMFor as Christ died and was exalted as man, so, as man, he is said to receive what, as God, he always had, in order that this great gift might extend to us. For the Word was not degraded by receiving a body, so that he should seek to “receive” God’s gift. Rather he deified what he put on; and more than that, he bestowed this gift upon the race of man.
MMSt. Athanasius (330), Contra Arianos, 2:70 (p. 293) [p. 404]
MMHe assumed a created human body, that, having renewed it as its creator, he might deify it in himself, and thus bring us all into the kingdom through our likeness to him.... For it was for this reason that the conjunction was of this kind, that he might join him who by nature was man to him who naturally belonged to the godhead, that his salvation and deification might be sure.
MMIn the Roman Catholic Mass (traditional Latin rite), the priest adds a few drops of water to a chalice full of wine, so that the water mingles and in effect becomes wine (since not enough is added to dilute the wine appreciably) and says:
MM“O God, by whom the worth of our human nature was wondrously fashioned, and refashioned more wondrously still, grant us, through this water-mingled-with-wine, to be partakers of his Godhead who was courteous enough to share our Manhood.”
[10] A. Rand, “Introduction to ‘The Romantic Manifesto’” 8/8/2h [August 1969] & RM vii-viii [The Romantic Manifesto, paperback edition]
MMMankind moved forward by the grace of those human bridges who are able to grasp and transmit, across the years or centuries, the achievement men had reached — and to carry them further. Thomas Aquinas is one illustrious example; he was the bridge between Aristotle and the Renaissance....
MMSpeaking only of the pattern, with no presumptuous comparison of stature intended, I am a bridge of that kind....
MMA. Rand, “Apollo 11” 8/9/9e [September 1969]
MMThe astronaut ... who remarked that his spacecraft was driven by Sir Isaac Newton, understood this issue. (And if I may be permitted to amend that remark, I would say that Sir Isaac Newton was the copilot of the flight; the pilot was Aristotle.)
MMA. Rand, “The Nature of Government” 2/12/45g [December 1963] and VOA 32c [The Virtue of Selfishness, — there is surely an error here. In the paperback edition, the page number is 107; it is not believable that the citation can be to the hardback edition] and CUI 329 [Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. The citation is to the paperback edition; it is page 295 in the hardback edition]
MMMan is the only species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; the knowledge potentially available to man is greater than any one man could begin to acquire in his own lifespan; every man gains an incalculable benefit from the knowledge discovered by others.
MMAS 387kk-mm (410oo-qq) and FNI 89 [For the New Intellectual; the citation is to the paperback edition]
MMTry to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by the men who had to discover it for the first time. 
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