reason

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

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.

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.

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 cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest - but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders_ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A.

To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes.

Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

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 out, it will merely wipe out the wiper. By refusing to say __t is,_ you are refusing to say __ am._ By suspending your judgment, you are negating your person. When a man declares: __ho am I to know?_- he is declaring: __ho am I to live?

Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man__ only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call __ree will_ is your mind__ freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge that you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can claim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your only judge of truth__nd if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man__ mind can perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of identification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process but his own judgment. Nothing can direct his judgment but his moral integrity.