There’s no way to make the irrational work.
But if I were given a choice – of all centuries – I’d select last the curse of being born in this one. And perhaps, if I weren’t curious, I’d choose never to be born at all.
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’t be punished for being good. One can’t be penalized for ability. If that is right, then we’d better start slaughtering one another, because there isn’t any right at all in the world!
But we, Equality 7-2521, are glad to be living. If this is a vice, then we wish no virtue.
We are the guardians of a great human function. Perhaps of the greatest function among the endeavors of man. We have achieved much and we have erred often. But we are willing in all humility to make way for our heirs. We are only men and we are only seekers. But we seek for truth with the best there is in our hearts. We seek with what there is of the sublime granted to the race of men. It is a great quest.
Everything bad comes from the mind, because the mind asks too many questions. It is blessed to believe, not to understand.
We are nothing. Mankind is all. By the grace of our brothers are we allowed our lives. We exist through, by and for our brothers who are the State. Amen.
There are two aspects of man’s existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art.
Why is it so important – what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right – so long as it’s not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic – and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else?
Nothing is given to man on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways – by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary.
Love is a response to values. It is with a person’s sense of life that one falls in love – with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality.
One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person’s character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul – the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness.
Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.
It’s a law of survival, isn’t it? – to seek the best. I didn’t come for your sake. I came for mine.
My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars.
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’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
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 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.
He seemed as graciously at home as in the best restaurants of the city; his elegance had an odd quality here – it did not insult the place, but seemed to transform it, like the presence of a king who never alters his manner, yet makes a palace of any house he enters.
I’ll listen if you want me to... But I think I should tell you now that nothing you can say will make any difference. If you don’t mind that, I don’t mind listening.
They had counted on his pity and dreaded his anger; they had not dared consider the third alternative: his indifference.