Atlas Shrugged Quotes

He had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act. ~ Ayn Rand

It seemed natural; natural to the moment's peculiar reality that was sharply clear, but cut off from everything, immediate, but disconnected, like a bright island in a wall of fog, the heightened, unquestioning reality one feels when one is drunk. ~ Ayn Rand

There was an air of luxury about the room, but it was the luxury of expert simplicity. ~ Ayn Rand

There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable - except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. ~ Ayn Rand

'Atlas Shrugged,' let's face it, was probably the most important novel of the 20th century that was never a film. ~ Albert S. Ruddy

As she looked at him, her dark gray eyes went slowly from astonishment to stillness, then to a strange expression that resembled a look of weariness, except that it seemed to reflect much more than the endurance of this one moment. ~ Ayn Rand

There was so calm, so natural, so total a certainty in the sound of her voice that the mere sound seemed to carry an immense persuasiveness. ~ Ayn Rand

John, the self-made man, self-made in every sense, out of nowhere, penniless, parentless, tie-less ... but I've always thought of him as if he had come into the world like Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, who sprang forth from Jupiter's head, fully grown and fully armed. ~ Ayn Rand

She sat beside him in the car, feeling no desire to speak, knowing that neither of them could conceal the meaning of their silence. ~ Ayn Rand

She marveled at the futility of his method: he was acting as if, by naming her opinion in advance, he would make her unable to alter it. ~ Ayn Rand

I tend to really be partial to Ayn Rand, and to The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. ~ Clarence Thomas

Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money? ~ Ayn Rand

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. ~ Ayn Rand

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. ~ Ayn Rand

But why?"
"You goddamn fool, do you think I consider their question debatable? ~ Ayn Rand

The action of naming an issue instead of evading it, was so unlike the usual behavior of all the men he knew, it was such a sudden, startling relief ... ~ Ayn Rand

Their terror had the evasive quality of guilt: it was not the fear that comes from understanding, but from the refusal to understand. ~ Ayn Rand

Were she lying crushed under the ruins of a building, were she torn by the bomb of an air raid, so long as she was still in existence she would know that action is man's foremost obligation, regardless of anything he feels ... ~ Ayn Rand

I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. ~ Ayn Rand

What books didn't influence me? If only someone would ask that! I've been waiting for years to answer it. Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, I will say, had absolutely no influence on me except to cause hours of incredulous boredom. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

She felt that his presence seemed more intensely real when she kept her eyes away from him, almost as if the stressed awareness of herself came from him, like the sunlight from the water. ~ Ayn Rand

All work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one's own eyes - which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification -which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before. ~ Ayn Rand

To fear to face an issue to believe that the worst is true.
Atlas Shrugged ~ Ayn Rand

A stream cut across the grass, and tree branches flowed low to the ground, like a curtain of green fluid. The sound of the water stressed the silence. The distant cut of open sky made the place seem more hidden. Far above, on the crest of a hill, one tree caught the first rays of sunlight. ~ Ayn Rand

Her leg, sculptured by the tight sheen of the stocking, its long line running straight, over an arched instep, to the tip of a foot in a high-heeled pump, had a feminine elegance that seemed out of place in the dusty train car ... ~ Ayn Rand

Man's life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, of a looting thug or a mooching mystic, but the life of a thinking being - not life by means of force or fraud, but life by means of achievement - not survival at any price, since there's only one price that pays for man's survival: reason. ~ Ayn Rand

We lived by that which we held to be good and punished that which we held to be evil. You live by that which you denounce as evil and punish that which you know to be good. ~ Ayn Rand

The anti-mind is the anti-life. ~ Ayn Rand

The source of work? Man's mind ... man's reasoning mind. ~ Ayn Rand

They kept their secret from the knowledge of others, not as a shameful guilt, but as a thing that was immaculately theirs, beyond anyone's right of debate or appraisal. ~ Ayn Rand

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice - and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man - by choice; he has to hold his life as a value - by choice; he has to learn to sustain it - by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues - by choice.
A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality. ~ Ayn Rand

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. ~ Ayn Rand

What do you suppose those women are after but the same thing as the chaser - the desire to gain their own value from the number and fame of the men they conquer? Only it's one step phonier, because the value they seek is not even in the actual fact, but in the impression on and the envy of other women. ~ Ayn Rand

They want us to pretend that we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us. ~ Ayn Rand

He said it without greeting, as if they had parted the day before. Because it took her a moment to regain the art of breathing, she realized for the first time how much that voice meant to her. ~ Ayn Rand

You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgement and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been calle anti social for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. ~ Ayn Rand

They scattered with no melody, no harmony, no rhythm to hold them. If music was emotion and emotion came from thought, then this was the scream of chaos, of the irrational, of the helpless, of man's self-abdication. ~ Ayn Rand

I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child's brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he's unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror. ~ Ayn Rand

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. (John Galt) ~ Ayn Rand

The evaluation of an action as 'practical,' depends on what it is that one wishes to practice. ~ Ayn Rand

Here, we trade achievements, not failures - values, not needs. We're free of one another, yet we all grow together. ~ Ayn Rand

A tall, fragile woman with pale blond hair and a face of such beauty that it seemed veiled by distance, as if the artist had been merely able to suggest it, not to make it quite real ... she was Kay Ludlow, the movie star who, once seen, could never be forgotten; the star who had retired and vanished five years ago, to be replaced by girls of indistinguishable names and interchangeable faces ... she felt that the glass cafeteria was a cleaner use for Kay Ludlow's beauty than a role in a picture glorifying the commonplace for possessing no glory. ~ Ayn Rand

You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty. ~ Ayn Rand

They said you were hard and cold and unfeeling."
"But it's true...I am, in the sense they mean - only have they ever told you in just what sense they mean it?"
"What did they mean about you?"
"Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. He means that .'to feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality. ~ Ayn Rand

The justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil. ~ Ayn Rand

Dagny listened to the Fourth Concerto, her head thrown back, her eyes closed. She lay half-stretched across the corner of a couch, her body relaxed and still; but tension stressed the shape of her mouth on her motionless face, a sensual shape drawn in lines of longing. ~ Ayn Rand

When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. ~ Ayn Rand

Wondering how one went about forcing one's mind into blankness, particularly after a lifetime lived on the axiom that the constant, clearest, most ruthless function of his rational faculty was his foremost duty. ~ Ayn Rand

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
[Kung Fu Monkey
Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009] ~ John Rogers

The road was dark, edged with trees. Looking up, he could see a few leaves against the stars; the leaves were twisted and dry, ready to fall. There were distant lights in the windows of houses scattered through the countryside; but the lights made the road seem lonelier.
He never felt loneliness except when he was happy. ~ Ayn Rand

Don't make the mistake of thinking that these three pupils of mine are some sort of superhuman creatures. They're something much greater and more astounding than that: they're normal men - a thing the world has never seen - and their feat is that they managed to survive as such. It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world's doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries - to remain human, since the human is the rational. ~ Ayn Rand

We all perform balancing acts between self and family, individual and community, private desire and group expectation. Gay people in particular must break with the groupthink of church and society in order to live their own lives. (It's why you still see half-read copies of Atlas Shrugged on the night tables of otherwise intelligent gay men.) ~ Christopher Bram

Both of them smiled derisively. But Francisco seemed to laugh at things because he saw something much greater. Jim laughed as if he wanted to let nothing remain great. ~ Ayn Rand

He was described as the literary leader of the age, but had never written a book that sold more than three thousand copies. ~ Ayn Rand

But don't I have any freedom of speech?"
"In your own house. Not in mine."
"Don't I have a right to my own ideas?"
"At your own expense. Not at mine."
"Don't you tolerate any differences of opinion?"
"Not when I'm paying the bills. ~ Ayn Rand

She felt an odd, light-hearted indifference, as if she suddenly wanted nothing but the comfort of surrendering to helplessness. ~ Ayn Rand

I have never felt guilty of my ability. I have never felt guilty of my mind. I have never felt guilty of being a man. I accepted no unearned guilt, and thus was free to earn and to know my own value. ~ Ayn Rand

Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess. ~ Ayn Rand

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. ~ Ayn Rand

Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man's instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live. ~ Ayn Rand

Incredulity and indifference were her only reaction: incredulity, because she could not conceive of what would bring human beings to such a state - indifference, because she could not regard those who reached it, as human any longer. ~ Ayn Rand

He said, looking down at her body, "Dagny, what a magnificent waste!"
She had to turn and escape. She felt herself blushing, for the first time in years: blushing because she knew suddenly that the sentence named what she had felt all evening. ~ Ayn Rand

Do you know what she did today?" He leaned confidentially across the table, pointing at the dishes in the sink. "She went to the market and left all the breakfast dishes there and said she'd do them later. I know what she wanted. She expected me to do them. Well, I'll fool her. I'll leave them just where they are. ~ Ayn Rand

Aren't you training a man who could become your most dangerous competitor?"
"That's the only sort of men I like to hire. Dagny, have you lived too long among the looters? Have you come to think that one man's ability is a threat to another?"
"Oh no! But I thought I was almost the only one left who didn't think that. ~ Ayn Rand

He was seeing the full extent of her failure - in the immensity of his own indifference. The droning stream of her insults was like the sound of a distant riveting machine, a long, impotent pressure that reached nothing within him. ~ Ayn Rand

I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind
and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression. ~ Ayn Rand

It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money - and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it. ~ Ayn Rand

There is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires - if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical? ~ Ayn Rand

They say that it's hard for men to agree. You'd be surprised how easy it is - when both parties hold as their moral absolute that neither exists for the sake of the other and that reason is their only means of trade. ~ Ayn Rand

No, justice has not ceased to exist. How could it? It is possible for men to abandon their sight of it, and then it is justice that destroys them. But it is not possible for justice to go out of existence, because one is an attribute of the other, because justice is the act of acknowledging that which exists. ~ Ayn Rand

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..'. ~ Ayn Rand

It was that ruthless tone, peculiarly his, which sounded implacable by being simple, devoid of any emotional value, save the quality of respect for facts. ~ Ayn Rand

A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? - Right or Wrong? ~ Ayn Rand

The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments. ~ Ayn Rand

If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn. ~ Ayn Rand

We do not tell - we show. We do not claim - we prove. ~ Ayn Rand

Don't tell me your evaluation. Give me the facts. ~ Ayn Rand

All your life, you have heard yourself denounced, not for your faults, but for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not for your mistakes, but for your achievements. You have been scorned for all those qualities of character which are your highest pride. You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgment and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been called anti-social for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. You have been called ruthless for the strength and self-discipline of your drive to your purpose. You have been called greedy for the magnificence of your power to create wealth. ~ Ayn Rand

Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. ~ Ayn Rand

She saw both serenity and suffering in the calm of his face, an expression like a smile of pain, though he was not smiling ... He did not look like a man bearing torture now, but like a man who sees that which makes the torture worth bearing. ~ Ayn Rand

It was as if a volcano were cracking open, yet the people at the foot of the mountain ignored the sudden fissures, the black fumes, the boiling trickles, and went on believing that their only danger was to acknowledge the reality of these signs. ~ Ayn Rand

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. ~ Ayn Rand

She had always been ... the motive power of her own happiness. ~ Ayn Rand

No matter what corruption he's taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity?-an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. ~ Ayn Rand

It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master. ~ Ayn Rand

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. ~ Ayn Rand

I'm not going to help you pretend - by arguing with you - that the reality you're talking about is not what it is, that there's still a way to make it work and to save your neck. There isn't. ~ Ayn Rand

They stopped and looked at each other. She knew, only when he did it, that she had known he would. He seized her, she felt her lips in his mouth, felt her arms grasping him in violent answer ... ~ Ayn Rand

If you came here dressed like this in order not to let me notice how lovely you are," he said, "you miscalculated. You're lovely. I wish I could tell you what a relief it is to see a face that's intelligent though a woman's. But you don't want to hear it. That's not what you came here for. ~ Ayn Rand

There was an expert competence in his manner of working; his movements were easy, intelligently economical. ~ Ayn Rand

He led her to the bedroom, he took off her clothes, without a word, in the manner of an owner undressing a person whose consent is not required. He clasped the pendant on her shoulders. She stood naked, the stone between her breasts, like a sparkling drop of blood. ~ Ayn Rand

This country was not built... by men who sought handouts. John Galt speech, Atlas Shrugged, 1957 ~ Alex Ayres

Our first rule here ... is that one must always see for oneself. ~ Ayn Rand

In a world that proclaims the non-existence of the mind, the moral righteousness of rule by brute force, the penalizing of the competent in favor of the incompetent, the sacrifice of the best to the worst - in such a world, the best have to turn against society and have to become its deadliest enemies. ~ Ayn Rand

She wanted to tell him of the years she had spent looking for men such as he to work with; she wanted to tell him that his enemies were hers, that she was fighting the same battle ... ~ Ayn Rand

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. ~ Ayn Rand

Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. ~ Ayn Rand

To trade by 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. ~ Ayn Rand

Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone. ~ Ayn Rand

She lay in bed, naked because her body had become an unfamiliar possession, too precious for the touch of a nightgown, because it gave her pleasure to feel naked and to feel as if the white sheets of her bed were touched by Francisco's body - when she thought that she would not sleep, because she did not want to rest and lose the most wonderful exhaustion she had ever known ... ~ Ayn Rand