Quotes About Action

Reason requires freedom, self-confidence and self-esteem. It requires the right to think and to act on the guidance of one's thinking—the right to live by one's own independent judgment. Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.

Since a value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep, and the amount of possible action is limited by the duration of one's lifespan, it is a part of one's life that one invests in everything one values. The years, months, days or hours of thought, of interest, of action devoted to a value are the currency with which one pays for the enjoyment one receives from it.

All work is an act of philosophy.

Peter, before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action, not any possible object of your charity.

Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated—as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.

No matter how hard a struggle he had lived through in the past, he had never reached the ultimate ugliness of abandoning the will to act. In moments of suffering, he had never let pain win its one permanent victory: he had never allowed it to make him lose the desire for joy. He had never doubted the nature of the world or man's greatness as its motive power and its core.

Si, antes de emprender alguna acción, tienes que obtener el permiso de la sociedad, no eres libre, te sea concedido ese permiso o no. Solamente un esclavo actúa bajo permiso. Un permiso no es un derecho.

Thought—he told himself quietly—is a weapon one uses in order to act. No action was possible. Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice. No choice was left to him. Thought sets one's purpose and the way to reach it. In the matter of his life being torn piece by piece out of him, he was to have no voice, no purpose, no way, no defense.

He saw for the first time that he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.

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...To remain alive, he must think.

The dance is the silent partner of music and participates in a division of labor: music presents a stylized version of man's consciousness in action—the dance presents a stylized version of man's body in action.

Years ago, a well-known political writer, Isabel Paterson, was talking to a businessman outraged by some government action. She urged him to speak up for his principles. "I agree with you totally," he said, "but I'm not in a position right now to do it." "The only position required," she replied, "is vertical.

No matter what night preceded it, she had never known a morning when she did not feel the rose of a quiet excitement that became a tightening energy on her body and a hunger for action in her mind - because this was the beginning of a day and it was a day of HER life.

Value' is that which one acts to gain and keep, 'virtue' is the action by which one gains and keeps it.

Thought - he told himself quietly - is a weapon one uses in order to act. No action was possible. Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice. No choice was left to him. Thought sets one's purpose and the way to reach it. In the matter of his life being torn piece by piece out of him, he was to have no voice, no purpose, no way, no defense.

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer.

2. To facilitate the acceptance of force, the Berkeley rebels attempted to establish a special distinction between force and violence: force, they claimed explicitly, is a proper form of social action, but violence is not. Their definition of the terms was as follows: coercion by means of a literal physical contact is "violence" and is reprehensible; any other way of violating rights is merely "force" and is a legitimate, peaceful method of dealing with opponents.

The issue now is men's lack of integrity, their failure to act according to the ideals they espouse.

Lo que uno siente hacia los muertos, pensó, se basa siempre en la imposibilidad de toda acción.

En la medida en que un hombre se guía por su juicio racional, actúa en concordancia con los requisitos de su naturaleza y, en esa medida, consigue una forma humana de supervivencia y bienestar; en la medida en que actúa de forma irracional, actúa como su propio destructor.

There was no action she could take against the men of undefined thought, of unnamed motives, of unstated purposes, of unspecified morality. There was nothing she could say to them—nothing would be heard or answered. What were the weapons, she thought, in a realm where reason was not a weapon any longer?

The man who has no purpose, but has to act, acts to destroy others. That is not the same thing as a productive or creative purpose.

Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically.