Atlas Shrugged
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Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1957)
- Who is John Galt?
- Evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.
- I swear by my life, and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
- It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.
- There might be some sort of justification for the savage societies in which a man had to expect that enemies could murder him at any moment and had to defend himself as best he could. But there can be no justification for a society in which a man is expected to manufacture the weapons for his own murderers.
- Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.
- He did not know whether the impossibility of acting had given him this sense of loathing, or whether the loathing had made him lose the desire to act. It's both, he thought; a desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving. If the only goal possible was to wheedle a precarious moment's favor from men who held guns, then neither action nor desire could exist any longer. Then could life? he asked himself indifferently. Life, he thought, had been defined as motion; man's life was purposeful motion; what was the state of a being to whom purpose and motion were denied, a being held in chains but left to breathe and to see all the magnificence of the possibilities he could have reached, left to scream "Why?", and to be shown the muzzle of a gun as sole explanation?
- The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.
- The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.
- There is no necessity for pain--why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity?--we who hold the love and the secret of joy, to what punishment have we been sentenced for it, and by whom?
- Haven't I? -- he thought. Haven't I thought of it since the first time I saw you? Haven't I thought of nothing else for two years?. . . He sat motionless, looking at her. He hear the words he never allowed himself to form, the words he had felt, known, yet had no faced, had hoped to destroy by never letting them be within his own mind, Now it was as sudden and shocking as if he were saying it to her…Since the first time I saw you…. Nothing but your body, that mouth of yours, and the way your eyes would look at me, if…. Through every sentence I ever said to you, through every conference you thought were so safe, through the importance of all the issues we discussed…. You trusted me, didn't you? To recognize greatness? To think of you as you deserved -- as if you were a man?
- Love is our response to our highest values.
- She thought suddenly that she was wrong about his lack of emotion: the hidden undertone of his manner was enjoyment. She realized that she had always felt a sense of light-hearted relaxation in his presence and known that he shared it. He was the only man she knew to whom she could speak without strain or effort. This, she thought, was a mind she respected an adversary worth matching. Yet there had always been an odd sense of distance between them, the sense of a closed door; there was in impersonal quality in his manner, something within him that could not be reached.
- She was twelve years old when she told Eddie Willers that she would run the railroad when they grew up. She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought---and never worried about it again.
- So you think you're sure of your opinions? You cannot be sure of anything. Are you going to endanger the harmony of your community, your fellowship with your neighbors, your standing, reputation, good name and financial security--for the sake of an illusion? For the sake of a mirage of thinking that you think? Are you going to run risks and court disasters---at a precarious time like ours---by opposing the existing social order in the name of those imaginary notions of yours which you call your convictions? You say that you're so right? Nothing is right, or ever can be.
- Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking...
- Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.
- Why ask useless questions? How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? Who is John Galt?
- I'll give you a hint. Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
- For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbours - between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.
So you think that money is the root of all evil, have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange which can not exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is not the product of moochers that claim your product by tears, or of the looters who take it from you by force, money is made possible only by the men that produce, is this what you consider evil, when you accept money in payment for your effort you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange if for the product of the effort of others. To trade by the means of money is the code of the men of good will. .money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort but money is only a tool, it will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires but it will not provide you with desires. Money will not purchase happiness for the man that has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. Let me give you a tip a clue to means characters, the man who damns money has attained it dishonorably, the man who respects it has earned it. Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil, that sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another their only substitute if they abandon money is the muzzle of a gun. Do you wish to know whether another that day is coming, watch money, money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. when you see that trading is done not by consent but by compulsion, when you see in order to produce you need to obtain permission from men that produce nothing, when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods but in favors, when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull then by work, when you see corruption and being rewarded and honesty becoming a self sacrifice, you may know that your society is doomed. when you have made evil the means of survival do not expect men to remain good, do not expect them to stay moral and loose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral, do not expect them to produce when production is punished and looting is rewarded do not ask who is destroying the world, you are. If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans I would choose the fact that they were the people who created the phrase "to make money" no other language or nation had used these words before. Men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words to make money hold the essence of human morality, yet now the looters credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievement as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt. Your greatest men the industrialists as braggarts and your magnificent factories as the products and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip driven slaves, the draughter???? Who simpers when he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip ought to learn the difference on his own hide. Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one and other then men become the tools of men. Blood whips and guns or dollars take your choice, there is no other and your time is running out
