| 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 all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking
out, the willful suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think--not
blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know.
It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape
the responsibility of judgment--on the unstated premise that a thing will
not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long
as you do not pronounce the verdict 'It is.'
From: Galt's Speech in Atlas Shrugged as reprinted in For the New Intellectual,
by Ayn Rand, C. 1961
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