#inking

Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch – or build a cyclotron – without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think. “But to think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs, or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival – so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question ‘to think or not to think.’ . . . “Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. . . Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer – and that is the way he has acted through most of his history (pages 1012-1013). ↗

— Ayn Rand

#foce #galt #philosophy #thinking #food

Abortion and racism are both symptoms of a fundamental human error. The error is thinking that when someone stands in the way of our wants, we can justify getting that person out of our lives. Abortion and racism stem from the same poisonous root, selfishness. ↗

— Alveda King

#both #error #fundamental #getting #human

I just want to be able to play and make people feel good with what I do. When you're thinking that way, anything can happen. And, usually, what happens is good. ↗

— Mark Knopfler

#anything #feel #feel good #good #happen

Mainly, I thought of Barney as a kid. You can always look into the faces of kids and see what they're thinking, if they're happy or sad. That's what I tried to do with Barney. ↗

— Don Knotts

#barney #faces #happy #i #i tried

Since the age of 12, all my musical thinking has been influenced by Afro-American music. ↗

— Alexis Korner

#american music #been #influenced #music #musical

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning. ↗

— Mary Wesley

#children #death #find #going #grow

The thing that cracks me up is how these reality characters start out thrilled and excited just to be on television, and how they move to thinking they are as big as the Friends. ↗

— Kathy Griffin

#characters #cracks #excited #friends #how

He was thinking alone, and seriously racking his brain to find a direction for this single force four times multiplied, with which he did not doubt, as with the lever for which Archimedes sought, they should succeed in moving the world, when some one tapped gently at his door. ↗

— Alexandre Dumas

#archimedes #brain #did #direction #door

Playing is my way of thinking, talking, communicating. ↗

— Lionel Hampton

#playing #talking #thinking #way

A moment's thinking is an hour in words. ↗

— Thomas Hood

#moment #thinking #words