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Book: Philosophy: Who Needs It
Quotes of Book: Philosophy: Who Needs It
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  1. Ayn Rand _ Philosophy: Who Needs It

    There are no defenders of man's mind-in the world's greatest scientific-technological civilization. All that is left is a battle between the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle-between men guided by their feelings and men guided by their reflexes.
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  2. Ayn Rand _ Philosophy: Who Needs It

    An emotion as such tells you nothing about reality, beyond the fact that something makes you feel something. Without a ruthlessly honest commitment to introspection-to the conceptual identification of your inner states-you will not discover what you feel, what arouses the feeling, and whether your feeling is an appropriate response to the facts of reality, or a mistaken response, or a vicious illusion produced by years of self-deception. The men who scorn or dread introspection take their inner states for granted, as an irreducible and irresistible primary, and let their emotions determine their actions. This means that they choose to act without knowing the context {reality}, the causes {motives}, and the consequences {goals} of their actions.
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  3. Ayn Rand _ Philosophy: Who Needs It

    Your subconscious is like a computer-more complex a computer than men can build-and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don't reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance-and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted. But one way or the other, your computer gives you print-outs, daily and hourly, in the form of emotions-which are lightning-like estimates of the things around you, calculated according to your values. If you programmed your computer by conscious thinking, you know the nature of your values and emotions. If you didn't, you don't.
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  4. Ayn Rand _ Philosophy: Who Needs It

    It is eminently reasonable that men should seek to associate with those who share their convictions and values. It is impossible to deal or even to communicate with men whose ideas are fundamentally opposed to one's own {and one should be free not to deal with them}. All proper associations are formed or joined by individual choice and on conscious, intellectual grounds {philosophical, political, professional, etc.}-not by the physiological or geographical accident of birth, and not on the ground of tradition. When men are united by ideas, i.e., by explicit principles, there is no room for favors, whims, or arbitrary power: the principles serve as an objective criterion for determining actions and for judging men, whether leaders or members.
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  5. Ayn Rand _ Philosophy: Who Needs It

    Serenity comes from the ability to say "Yes" to existence. Courage comes from the ability to say "No" to the wrong choices made by others.
    book-quotephilosophymetaphysicsserenity
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