Mans mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch or build a cyclotron without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think. But 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. The function of your stomach, lungs, or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival so that for you, who are a human being, the question to be or not to be is the question to think or not to think. . . . 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 means of volitional choice. . . Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer and that is the way he has acted through most of his history (pages 1012-1013).
About This Quote
About Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand was a 20th-century American american writer and philosopher. Alice O'Connor, better known by her pen name Ayn Rand, was a Russian-American writer and philosopher. She is known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system which she named Objectivism. Read more on Wikipedia →
Themes
- Philosophy — Deep thoughts on existence, knowledge, and the nature of reality