John Galt Quotes

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice... Man has to be a man-by choice; he has to hold his life as a value-by choice; he has to learn to sustain it-by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

Man is able to decide for or against reason, he is able to create beyond reason or to destroy below reason

As for morality, well that's all tied up with the question of consciousness.

Everythings a choice. Nobody's born good. Nobody's born evil. It's always a choice.

Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man's mental or moral economy.

Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

From the days of Cain and Abel, we know all too well there will always be evil. But that evil shouldn't take away our freedoms.

Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.

I think God gives every one of us our own will, and unfortunately, some people choose to do evil things with it.

You know, we all can do bad, and we all can do good.

Man is free; yet we must not suppose that he is at liberty to do everything he pleases, for he becomes a slave the moment he allows his actions to be ruled by passion.

Nature is at work. Character and destiny are her handiwork. She gives us love and hate, jealousy and reverence. All that is ours is the power to choose which impulse we shall follow.

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.

Were there no desire there would be no virtue, and because one man desires what another does not, who shall say whether the child of his desire be Vice or Virtue?

Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it.

If our wondrous kindness is evidence for God, is our capacity for great evil proof of the Devil?

I've always felt like we're all human beings and we're all basically given the tools to make whatever choices we want to make. How we treat other people. How we treat ourselves. Just the whole philosophy of that and the philosophical logic of that is that we're all capable of great acts of evil, and we're all capable of great acts of good.

Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be either good or evil.

Man can, indeed, act contrarily to the decrees of God, as far as they have been written like laws in the minds of ourselves or the prophets, but against that eternal decree of God, which is written in universal nature ...

The human being is a strange mixture of blind instinct, on one hand, and conscience, on the other.

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

Life is not yours to take.

Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls.