Evil
"Thinking is man's only 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."
Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.
I saw that evil was impotent - that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real - and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.
As a being of volitional consciousness, [man] knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong in action means danger to his life; to be wrong in person, to be evil, means to be unfit for existence . . . No man can survive the moment of pronouncing himself irredeemably evil; should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide."
~ Found at Ayn Rand Lexicon - Evil
im·po·tent
ˈimpətnt/
adjective
- 1.unable to take effective action; helpless or powerless.
