atlas-shrugged

It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world__ doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries__o remain human, since the human is the rational.

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice _ and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man _ by choice; he has to hold his life as a value _ by choice; he has to learn to sustain it _ by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues _ by choice.A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man__ Life is its standard of value.All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.

Man__ 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__ot life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement__ot survival at any price, since there__ only one price that pays for man__ survival: reason.

The anti-mind is the anti-life.

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer__nd that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

Man__ mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action...To remain alive, he must think.

The source of work? Man__ mind...man__ reasoning mind.

A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. __alue_ is that which one acts to gain and keep, 'virtue_ is the action by which one gains and keeps it. __alue_ presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? 'Value_ presupposes a standard, a purpose and the necessity of action in the face of an alternative. Where there are no alternatives, no values are possible.

Through all the ages the mind has been regarded as evil, and every form of insult: from heretic to materialist to exploiter__very form of iniquity: from exile to disfranchisement to expropriation__very form of torture: from sneers to rack to firing squad__ave been brought down upon those who assumed the responsibility of looking at the world through the eyes of a living consciousness and performing the crucial act of a rational connection. Yet only to the extent to which__n chains, in dungeons, in hidden corners, in the cells of philosophers, in the shops of traders__ome men continued to think, only to that extent was humanity able to survive.

Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess.

Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one__ values. A morality that dares to tell you to find happiness in the renunciation of your happiness__o value the failure of your values__s an insolent negation of morality.

This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.

Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death.

Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two__xistence and consciousness__re axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end.

Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.

Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.