(Originally published in Bottom Line Personal 5/1/95. Reprinted by permission.)

When you are assertive, you honor your desires, needs and values without throwing your weight around. Being assertive requires strength – not belligerence or inappropriate aggressive behavior.

Here’s how to develop a healthy level of self-assertiveness without offending other people.

WHAT IS SELF-ASSERTIVENESS? Read more →

This essay was originally published in The Objectivist Newsletter in January 1963.

The distinguishing characteristic of twentieth-century philosophy is a resurgence of irrationalism – a revolt against reason.

Students in colleges today are assailed with pronouncements to the effect that factual certainty is impossible, that the contents of man’s mind need bear no necessary relationship to the facts of reality, that the concept of “facts of reality” is an old-fashioned superstition, that reality is “mere appearance,” that man can know nothing. It is with such intellectual equipment that their teachers arm them to deal with the problems of life. Read more →

Not long ago, I was asked to submit a paper that would address the following question: “Now that more and more psychologists are doing research and writing books and articles about self-esteem, what do I see as the immediate challenges facing those who work in the field?” In response, I submitted this short essay.

The Importance of Definitions Read more →

Reason and Analysis, by Brand Blanshard, reviewed by Nathaniel Branden
This essay was originally published in The Objectivist Newsletter in February 1963.

“Both reason as a source of knowledge and rationality as a practical ideal are today under attack. Indeed there has been no period in the past two thousand years when they have undergone a bombardment so varied, so competent, so massive and sustained as in the last half-century.” Read more →

“Do you know my greatest reward for ‘The Fountainhead?’ You.” (Ayn Rand to Nathaniel Branden)

Get your very own Limited Edition Autographed copy of “My Years with Ayn Rand”.

This incredible autobiographical book charts the course of the clandestine, tempestuous relationship between the enigmatic author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, Nathaniel Branden – her young disciple and future pioneer of the self-esteem movement. In this book, discover the real Ayn Rand through the eyes of a man who became her soul mate and shared her passions and philosophical ideals. Read more →