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The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, ...more

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In the many months of his absence, she never wondered whether he was true to her or not; she knew he was. She knew, even though she was too young to k...more

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Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are ...more

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If that’s the price of getting together, then I’ll be damned if I want to live on the same earth with any human beings! If the rest of them can surviv...more

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To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact tha...more

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Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically.

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Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—n...more

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Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by...more

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Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which al...more

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The anti-mind is the anti-life.

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A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. ‘Value’ is that which one act...more

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A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to c...more

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Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped o...more

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There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value.All that which is proper to the life of a rational be...more

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To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing hi...more