All 16 Uses of
volition
in
Atlas Shrugged
- She felt her power of volition knocked out by some single, dull blow that made her unable to move.†
Chpt 1.8 *
- And your victims should discover that it is their own volition-which you cannot force-that makes you possible.†
Chpt 2.4
- They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you-just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition.†
Chpt 2.4
- The water tower cracked and its shreds hit the ground white its wheel was still describing a long curve through the air, as if of its own leisurely volition.†
Chpt 3.3
- 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.†
Chpt 3.7
- A being of volitional consciousness has no automatic course of behavior.†
Chpt 3.7
- His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice.†
Chpt 3.7
- "The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin, "A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality.†
Chpt 3.7
- A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost-yet such is their image of man's nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.†
Chpt 3.7
- The day when he grasps that matter has no volition is the day when he grasps that he has-and this is his birth as a human being.†
Chpt 3.7
- …but only with the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn to integrate-the day when he grasps that his senses cannot deceive him, that physical objects cannot act without causes, that his organs of perception are physical and have no volition, no power to invent or to distort, that the evidence they give him is an absolute, but his mind must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify…†
Chpt 3.7
- He believes that physical objects are endowed with a mysterious volition, moved by causeless, unpredictable whims, while he is a helpless pawn at the mercy of forces beyond his control.†
Chpt 3.7
- As a being of volitional consciousness, he knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life.†
Chpt 3.7
- Fear and guilt are your chronic emotions, they are real and you do deserve them, but they don't come from the superficial reasons you invent to disguise their cause, not from your 'selfishness,' weakness or ignorance, but from a real and basic threat to your existence: fear, because you have abandoned your weapon of survival, guilt, because you know you have done it volitionally.†
Chpt 3.7
- Admit that the whole of your struggle, your doubts, your fakes, your evasions, was a desperate quest for escape from the responsibility of a volitional consciousness-a quest for automatic knowledge, for instinctive action, for intuitive certainty-and while you called it a longing for the state of an angel, what you were seeking was the state of an animal.†
Chpt 3.7
- You cannot obtain the products of a mind except on the owner's terms, by trade and by volitional consent.†
Chpt 3.7
Definition:
-
(volition) will (done consciously and voluntarily without being forced or threatened)