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 and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man's 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.
More Quotes from Ayn Rand:
There are two kinds of teachers of the Morality of Death the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle ... those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness.... No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims in matter the enslavement of mans body, in spirit the destruction of his mind ... make no mistake about the character of the mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages and power, the power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust.... But it cannot be done to you without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you deserve it.Ayn Rand
She looked at the crowd and she felt, simultaneously, astonishment that they should stare at her, when this event was so personally her own that no communication about it was possible, and a sense of fitness that they should be here, that they should want to see it, because the sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.
Ayn Rand
The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them.
Ayn Rand
I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Ayn Rand
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.
Ayn Rand
When personal judgment is inoperative (or forbidden), men's first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice
Ayn Rand
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