Quotes about Identity
This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them.
— Ayn Rand
Reason is the faculty that perceives, identifies and integrates the material provided by his senses. The task of his senses is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason; his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.
— Ayn Rand
I think that your sister is awful. I think it's disgusting-a woman acting like a grease-monkey and posing around like a big executive. It's so unfeminine. Who does she think she is, anyway?
— Ayn Rand
A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
— Ayn Rand
A code that forbids you to cast the first stone, has forbidden you to admit the identity of stones and to know when or if you're being stoned.
— Ayn Rand
To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes.
— Ayn Rand
So the advocacy of "ethnicity," means racism plus tradition i.e., racism plus conformity i.e., racism plus staleness.
— Ayn Rand
The integrated sum of a man's basic values is his sense of life.
— Ayn Rand
Almost unanimously, man is regarded as an unnatural phenomenon: either as a supernatural entity, whose mystic (divine) endowment, the mind ("soul"), is above nature—or as a subnatural entity, whose mystic (demoniacal) endowment, the mind, is an enemy of nature ("ecology"). The purpose of all such theories is to exempt man from the Law of Identity.
— Ayn Rand
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.
— Ayn Rand
Those who seek some sort of a higher purpose or 'universal goal,' who don't know what to live for, who moan that they must 'find themselves.' You hear it all around us. That seems to be the official bromide of our century. Every book you open. Every drooling self-confession. It seems to be the noble thing to confess. I'd think it would be the most shameful one.
— Ayn Rand
Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father's expectations or make up for their father's mistakes....
— Barack Obama