Ayn Rand

...they want us to pretend that we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us.

Señor d.__nconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?___ust exactly what it deserves.___h, how cruel!___on__ you believe in the operation of the moral law, madame?_ Francisco asked gravely. __ do.

..each remembered other moments, on a sleepless night, on an afternoon of steady rain, in a church, in an empty street at sunset, when each had wondered why there was so much suffering and ugliness in the world. They had not tried to find the answer and they had gone on living as if no answer were necessary. But each had known a moment when, in lonely, naked honesty, he had felt the need of an answer.

Such was the code that the world had accepted and such was the key to the code: that it hooked man__ love of existence to a circuit of torture, so that only the man who had nothing to offer would have nothing to fear, so that the virtues which made life possible and the values which gave it meaning became the agents of its destruction, so that one__ best became the tool of one__ agony, and man__ life on earth became impractical.

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence__y his own choice.

If that__ the price of getting together, then I__l be damned if I want to live on the same earth with any human beings! If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? Nothing can make self-immolation proper. Nothing can give them the right to turn men into sacrificial animals. Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can__ be punished for being good. One can__ be penalized for ability. If that is right, then we__ better start slaughtering one another, because there isn__ any right at all in the world!

Of course I need you. I go insane when I see you. You can do almost anything you wish with me. Is that what you want to hear? Almost, Dominique. And the things you couldn't make me do _ you could put me through hell if you demanded them and I had to refuse you, as I would. Through utter hell, Dominique. Does that please you? Why do you want to know whether you own me? It's so simple. Of course you do. All of me that can be owned. You'll never demand anything else. But you want to know whether you could make me suffer. You could. What of it?" The words did not sound like surrender, because they were not torn out of him, but admitted simply and willingly. She felt no thrill of conquest; she felt herself owned more than ever, by a man who could say these things, know them to be true, and still remain controlled and controlling _ as she wanted him to remain.

Reason is your means of survival _ so that for you, who are a human being, the question __o be or not to be_ is the question 'to think or not to think..'.

Man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child__ education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.

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 means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires...Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform.

To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call __uman nature,_ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct.

By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man__very man__s an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

The mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act__he process of reason__ust be performed by each man alone.

Man__ life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose . If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man__or the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.

Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies...It is only the concept of __ife_ that makes the concept of 'Value_ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.

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.