Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it – that no substitute can do your thinking – that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.
He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject... There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind.
The crowd would have forgiven anything, except a man who could remain normal under the vibrations of its enormous collective sneer.
I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.
A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment... is not, strictly speaking, a society, but a mob held together by institutionalized gang-rule.
To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She’s earned it, it’s a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake – and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.
Great men can’t be ruled... The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional.
The three of them set out every morning on adventures of their own kind. Once, an elderly professor of literature, Mrs. Taggart’s friend, saw them on top of a pile in a junk yard, dismantling the carcass of an automobile. He stopped, shook his head and said to Francisco, ‘A young man of your position ought to spend his time in libraries, absorbing the culture of the world.’ ‘What do you think I’m doing?’ asked Francisco.
My dearest one, it is not proper for men to be without names. There was a time when each man had a name of his own to distinguish him from all other men. So let us choose our names. I have read of a man who lived many thousands of years ago, and of all the names in these books, his is the one I wish to bear. He took the light of the gods and brought it to men, and he taught men to be gods. And he suffered for his deed as all bearers of light must suffer. His name is Prometheus.
People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, comdemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked.
When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the most, has the least to say. It’s taken for granted that he has no voice and his reasons he could offer are rejected in advance as prejudiced – since no speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It’s so much easier to pass judgment on a man than an idea.
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 – the process of reason – must be performed by each man alone.
It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. We have broken the laws. The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. May we be forgiven!
When the law no longer protects you from the corrupt, but protects the corrupt from you – you know your nation is doomed.
You could tell them why they should hire you so very much better than I could. But they won’t listen to you and they’ll listen to me. Because I’m the middleman. The shortest distance between two points is not a straight line – it’s a middleman. And the more middlemen, the shorter. Such is the psychology of a pretzel.
They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: ‘Is this true?’ They ask: ‘Is this what others think is true?’ Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull.
A man’s spirit is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego.
She wondered why she had never noticed that she did not know his name and why she had never asked him. Perhaps because she had known everything she had to know about him from that first glance.
The right to agree with others is not a problem in any society; it is the right to disagree that is crucial.
Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.