Harman Singh

"The motive of all the attacks on man's rational faculty - from any quarter, in any of the endless variations under the verbal dust of all the murky volumes - is a single hidden premise: the desire to exempt consciousness from the law of identity. The hallmark of a mystic is the savagely stubborn refusal to accept the fact that consciousness, like any other existent, possesses identity, that it is a faculty of a specific nature functioning through specific means. While the advance of civilization has been eliminating one area of magic after the other, the last stand of the believers in the miraculous consists of their frantic attempts to regard identity as the disqualifying element of consciousness. The implicit but unadmitted premise of the neo-mystics of modern philosophy is the notion that only an ineffable consciousness can acquire a valid knowledge of reality. That 'true' knowledge has to be causeless (i.e., acquired without any means of cognition)." Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

In a mere 82 pages in total, Ayn Rand puts on paper the most important philosophical work, perhaps, in history so far. How the human mind functions.

"The problem might appear to be esoteric. Let me remind you that the fate of human societies, of knowledge, of science, of progress, and of every human life depends on it. What is at stake here is the cognitive efficacy of man's mind." Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology

"Amidst the incalculable number and complexity of choices that confront a man in his day-to-day existence, with the frequency of bewildering torrents of events, and with the alternation of successes and failures, of joys that seem too rare and suffering that lasts too long - he is often in danger of losing his perspective and the reality of his own convictions. Remember that abstractions do not exist: they are merely man's epistemological method of perceiving that which exists - and that which exists is concrete. To acquire the full persuasive, irresistible power of reality, man's metaphysical abstractions have to confront him in the form of concretes - i.e., in the form of art." Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto