Atlas Shrugged Quotes
Atlas Shrugged Quote of the day
Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess.
Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?
To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
...he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.
...there can be no justification for a society in which a man is expected to manufacture the weapons for his own murderers.
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.
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.
It was the smile of a man who is able to see, to know and to create the glory of existence. It was the mocking, challenging smile of a brilliant intelligence.
This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.
Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.
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.
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.
Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.
Reason is your means of survival — so that for you, who are a human being, the question ‘to be or not to be’ is the question 'to think or not to think..'.
Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
...they want us to pretend that we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us.
Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment’s torture.
The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it.
He did not know that he was expected to attempt to buy his way into society and that they anticipated the pleasure of rejecting him. He had no time to notice their disappointment.
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.
All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good
Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably