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Did Rand say anything about what she considered genius?
Looking just at her characters, it seems as though her belief about genius has a lot in common with Kant's ... It does have a lot in common with Kant's. Here are quotes from the intelligence and intellectuals entries at aynrandlexicon.com:
Intelligence
Intelligence is the ability to deal with a broad range of abstractions. [Man] survives by means of man-made products, and . . . the source of man-made products is man’s intelligence. Intelligence is the ability to grasp the facts of reality and to deal with them long-range (i.e., conceptually). Intelligence is not an exclusive monopoly of genius; it is an attribute of all men, and the differences are only a matter of degree. If genius is penalized, so is the faculty of intelligence in every other man. There is only this difference: the average man does not possess the genius’s power of self-confident resistance, and will break much faster ... Intellectuals
The professional intellectual is the field agent of the army whose commander-in-chief is the philosopher. Those who deal with the sciences studying nature have to rely on the intellectual for philosophical guidance and information: for moral values, for social theories, for political premises, for psychological tenets and, above all, for the principles of epistemology, that crucial branch of philosophy which studies man’s means of knowledge and makes all other sciences possible. The intellectual is the eyes, ears and voice of a free society: it is his job to observe the events of the world, to evaluate their meaning and to inform the men in all the other fields. [The intellectuals] are a group that holds a unique prerogative: the potential of being either the most productive or the most parasitical of all social groups. If they adopt a philosophy of reason—if their goal is the development of man’s rational faculty and the pursuit of knowledge—they are a society’s most productive and most powerful group ... Historically, the professional intellectual is a very recent phenomenon: he dates only from the industrial revolution. There are no professional intellectuals in primitive, savage societies, there are only witch doctors. The professional businessman and the professional intellectual came into existence together, as brothers born of the industrial revolution. Both are the sons of capitalism—and if they perish, they will perish together. The tragic irony will be that they will have destroyed each other; and the major share of the guilt will belong to the intellectual.
Ed
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