"Thinking is a man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willfull suspension of one's consciousness, the refusal to think--not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgement--on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict 'it is.' Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality...."