Ayn Rand

“What do you think of the masses—those people who have no talent, but want to earn a living?”

She answered:

There is no human being who has no talent. Every human being, if he uses his mind, has talent. To that extent, he should not be pretentious, and he shouldn’t aspire to more than he is able to understand and produce with his own mind. But there is no such thing as a worthless human being. He makes himself that. There is no such thing as “the little people.”

Now, let’s suppose that there is a class or group of people of such limited intelligence that they really are pretty helpless. Well, if you are concerned with them, you should be more of an advocate of the exceptional men than I am—if it’s possible—because it is only by means of the work of the better minds, and in a free society, that those really helpless people (if they exist) can survive at all.

They couldn’t survive in a more primitive society. It is only in an industrial society that they can survive, and an industrial society can exist only in freedom.

But just to answer your practical question: before one even considers it, shouldn’t one ask why anybody is entitled to concern, interest, and sympathy because he is undistinguished? If there are such people—and that’s your choice of word, not mine—then I would say they deserve no further interest.

What we should be interested in is the talented, the intelligent, the hardworking, the ambitious—the people who want to carry their own weight and make something of themselves. And that’s the overwhelming majority of Americans.