"Whoever you are--you who are alone with my words in this moment, with
nothing but the honesty to help you understand--the choice is still open
to be a human being, but the price is to start from scratch, to stand
naked in the face of reality and, reversing a costly historical error,
to declare: 'I am, therefore I'll think.'
"Accept the irrevocable fact that your life depends upon your mind. Admit
that the whole of your struggle, your doubts, your fakes, your
evasions, was a desperate quest for escape from the responsibility of a
volitional consciousness--a quest for automatic knowledge, for
instinctive action, for intuitive certainty--and while you called it a
longing for the state of an angel, what you were seeking was the state
of an animal. Accept, as your moral ideal, the task of becoming a man.
Do not say that you're afraid to trust your mind because you know so
little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the
little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge
and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from
the hockshops of authority. Accept the fact that you are not omniscient,
but playing a zombie will not give you omniscience--that your mind is
fallible, but becoming mindless will not make you infallible--that an
error made on your own in safer than ten truths accepted on faith,
because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second
destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. In place of your
dream of an omniscient automaton, accept the fact that any knowledge
man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that THAT is
his distinction in the universe, THAT is his nature, his morality, his
glory." --Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.
