Daily Inspiration Quote by Leonard Peikoff

The line sounds like bland civic hygiene until you notice what it’s really doing: staking a claim for moral and intellectual sovereignty. Peikoff isn’t merely recommending “open-mindedness.” He’s drawing a boundary around responsibility. “Each man” is pointedly individualist, old-fashioned in a way that’s strategic: it refuses the modern escape routes of “we,” “society,” or “my community told me.” A verdict is a court term. It implies stakes, consequences, and a standard of proof. You don’t get to outsource it to vibes, consensus, or institutional prestige.

The key pressure point is “must.” This is not optional epistemic self-care; it’s an obligation. In Peikoff’s Objectivist orbit, the ethical subtext is that thinking is a duty and that evasion is a form of wrongdoing. The sentence quietly shames the passive consumer of opinions. If you’re repeating a take you haven’t earned, you’re failing the basic requirements of personhood as he defines it.

“Weighing all the relevant evidence” also smuggles in a hard-edged view of rationality: evidence is not infinite, and relevance is not democratic. Someone has to judge what counts, and that judge is you. The phrase pushes against both dogma (accepting conclusions on authority) and relativism (treating conclusions as personal taste). The cultural context is a 20th-century philosophical landscape obsessed with systems, structures, and group explanations; Peikoff’s rhetoric answers with courtroom individualism: no alibis, no committees, no abdication.