Atlas Quotes
Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.
To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes.
Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.
If, to him, love was a celebration of one’s self and of existence—then, to the self-haters and life-haters, the pursuit of destruction was the only form and equivalent of love.
...she stood beside him, sagging in his arms, abandoning herself to anything he wished, in open acknowledgment of his power to reduce her to helplessness by the pleasure he had the power to give her.
The justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil.
Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don’t.
...there’s nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It’s the only measure of human value.
There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.
What’s wealth but the means of expanding one’s life? There’s two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster.
No action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice.
...there was no guilt in his face, no doubt, nothing but the calm of an inviolate self-confidence.
The only thing that counts in life is solid, material assets. It's no time for theories when everything is falling to pieces around us.
...there can be no justification for a society in which a man is expected to manufacture the weapons for his own murderers.
...he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.
He saw for the first time that he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.
Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically.
She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary.
She lay on her back, looking up at the sky, feeling no desire to move or think or know that there was any time beyond this moment.
He knew that the dread in these men’s minds was not of the fact, but of his naming it—as if the fact had not existed, but his words held the power to make it exist.
Well, whose opinion did you take?”“I don’t ask for opinions.”“What do you go by?”“Judgment.”“Well, whose judgment did you take?”“Mine.”“But whom did you consult about it?”“Nobody.
You always play it open, don’t you?” he asked.“I’ve never noticed you doing otherwise.”“I thought I was the only one who could afford to.
A sense of humor is the best indicator that you will recover
Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance
We're all ghosts. We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.
later that night i held an atlas in my lap ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered where does it hurt?it answered everywhere everywhere everywhere.
If I could create something that is even minutely close to a small percentile of a genius as Cloud Atlas, I shall deem my life worthy!
The United States has never been in a united state, it has never been a united state. It never will. Lines on screens and paper do not change that.
All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good
I wish she’d said something different, but patriarchy is as prevalent around the world as racism and xenophobia are. We can’t hide from it, not even here.