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

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And that is why I consider promiscuity immoral. Not because sex is evil, but because sex is too good and too important... What sex should involve is a...more

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Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.

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Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surren...more

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Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are ...more

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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 tha...more

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Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being—n...more

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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...more

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Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which al...more

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The anti-mind is the anti-life.

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A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior. He needs a code of values to guide his actions. ‘Value’ is that which one act...more

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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 c...more

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A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? - Right or Wrong?

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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 o...more

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There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value.All that which is proper to the life of a rational be...more