Reidy

Aristotle would agree with you. He recognized a sliding scale of entityhood, depending on the extent to which something (to use a dangerous word) has its own principle of motion. The immovable mover and the heavenly bodies are at the top of the scale and people next, then it moves down through animals and plants to artifacts and finally to heaps, the last being the sort of thing you're talking about. James Lennox, an Objectivist, has written about this.

I don't know who the acquaintance was, though I suspect it was Branden. I heard her say this in an interview / panel show on the Columbia University radio station in the 60s, and this was the way she put it. Her audience wasn't the already-converted who would have known who Branden was. If that was their source, it wasn't an ARI bowlderization.