Atlas Shrugged

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your means of survival—your victims.
"If you wish to know how I have done it and what I told them to make them quit, you are hearing it now.
I told them, in essence, the statement I am making tonight. They were men who had lived by my code,
but had not known how great a virtue it represented. I made them see it. I brought them, not a
re-evaluation, but only an identification of their values.
"We, the men of the mind, are now on strike against you in the name of a single axiom, which is the root
of our moral code, just as the root of yours is the wish to escape it: the axiom that existence exists.
"Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something
exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty
of perceiving that which exists.
"If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a
contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it
could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to
perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.
"Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you
cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of
your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest
erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a
solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.
"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. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors
—the greatest of. your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule
of all knowledge: A is A. A. thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am
here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.
"Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains
the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it
cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A. Or, if you wish it stated in simpler language: You cannot
have your cake and eat it, too.
"Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? AH the disasters that have wrecked your
world, came from your leaders1 attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to
face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact
that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.
"Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it. 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.
"All thinking is a process of identification and integration. Man perceives a blob of color; by integrating
the evidence of his sight and his touch, he learns to identity it as a solid object: he learns to identify the
object as a table; he learns that the table is made of wood; he learns that the wood consists of cells, that
the cells consist of molecules, that the molecules consist of atoms. All through this process, the work of
his mind consists of answers to a single question: What is it? His means to establish the truth of his