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Thought means life, since those who do not
think so do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.
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-Amos Bronson Alcott
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*Where is thought, if it
never leaves the thinker?
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-Television commercial for Canon Copiers
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I think, therefore I am.
(Cogito, ergo sum.)
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-Rene Descartes
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A life predicated on being obedient and
taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way
reduces to a minimum one's own need to think.
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-Adolf Eichmann
In writings reported in the New York Times, August 13, 1999
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Thinking is an experimental dealing with
small quantities of energy, just as a general moves miniature figures over
a map before setting his troops in action.
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-Sigmund Freud
New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis
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Thought is action in rehearsal.
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-Sigmund Freud
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Many people have played themselves to
death. Many people have eaten and drunk themselves to death. Nobody
ever thought himself to death.
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-Gilbert Highet
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Drunkenness is not a mere matter of
intoxicating liquors; it goes deeper, far deeper. Drunkenness is the
failure of a man to control his thoughts.
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-David Grayson
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*And though we choose
between reality and madness, it's either sadness or euphoria.
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-Billy Joel
Turnstiles, 1976
"Summer, Highland Falls"
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People demand freedom of speech to make up
for the freedom of thought which they avoid.
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-Soren Aabye Kierkegaard
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That is the whole trouble with being a
heretic. One usually must think out everything for oneself.
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-Aubrey Menan
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Excuse me if I have some place in my mind
where I go time to time.
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-Tom Petty
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*But man's responsibility
goes still further: a process of thought is not automatic nor "instinctive"
nor involuntary---nor infallible. Man has to initiate it, to
sustain it and to bear responsibility for its results. He has to discover
how to tell what is true or false and how to correct his own errors; he has
to discover how to validate his concepts, his conclusions, his knowledge;
he has to discover the rules of thought, the laws of logic, to
direct his thinking. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of the
efficacy of his mental effort.
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-Ayn Rand
The Virtue of Selfishness, 1964
"The Objectivist Ethics", 1963
This essay originally appeared in The Objectivist Newsletter,
February, 1963
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*I am, therefore I'll
think.
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-John Galt, the hero in Ayn Rand's
Atlas Shrugged, 1957
Part Three : A Is A, Ch. VII, "'This is John Galt Speaking'"
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*If I were to speak your
kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou
shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. 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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-John Galt, the hero in Ayn Rand's
Atlas Shrugged, 1957
Part Three : A Is A, Ch. VII, "'This is John Galt Speaking'"
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I was a freethinker before I knew how to
think.
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-George Bernard Shaw
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Life does not consist mainly, or even
largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of
thought that is forever flowing through one's head.
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-Mark Twain
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I think I think, therefore I think I am.
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-Mark Twain
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