I’m With the Rand

Celebrity fans of the cult of selfishness.

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Angelina Jolie

Angelina Jolie: “I just think [Ayn Rand] has a very interesting philosophy…You reevaluate your own life and what’s important to you.”

Christina Ricci

Christina Ricci: “My favorite book is The Fountainhead…I relate to it because of the idea that you’re not a bad person if you don’t love everyone.”

Vince Vaughn: “The last book I read was the book I’ve been rereading most of my life—The Fountainhead.”

Rob Lowe: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is a stupendous achievement and I just adore it.”

Eva Mendes: Any potential boyfriend “has to be an Ayn Rand fan.”

Mark Cuban: “I don’t know how many times I have read [The Fountainhead], but it got to the point where I had to stop because I would get too fired up.”

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.): Recently tweeted, “Still reading Atlas Shrugged, quite the read.”

Hugh Heffner

Hugh Hefner: The Fountainhead “is a compelling tribute to man’s quest for personal freedom.”

Billie Jean King: “Like Dagny Taggart, I had to learn how to be selfish, although selfish has the wrong connotation. As I see it, being selfish is really doing your own thing.”

Jerry Lewis

Jerry Lewis: The Fountainhead is “a very profound book…Makes you think!”

Brad Pitt

Brad Pitt: The Fountainhead “is so dense and complex, it would have to be a six-hour movie.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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