Atlas Shrugged

by Ayn Rand

The victim whom she could not protect was her only point of reassurance in a world dissolving around her.

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. No, he thought, not an assurance of victory—who can ever have that?—only the chance to act, which is all one needs. Now he was contemplating, impersonally and for the first time, the real heart of terror: being delivered to destruction with one’s hands tied behind one’s back.

They decided it without him. . . . They did not call for him, they did not ask, they did not let him speak. . . . They were not bound even by the duty to let him know—to let him know that they had slashed part of his life away and that he had to be ready to walk on as a cripple.

She stood, in a room of crumbling plaster, pressed to the window-pane, looking up at the unattainable form of everything she loved. She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.

She could not descend to an existence where her brain would explode under the pressure of forcing itself not to outdistance incompetence. She could not function to the rule of: Pipe down—keep down—slow down—don’t do your best, it is not wanted!

It seemed to her that some destroyer was moving soundlessly through the country and the lights were dying at his touch—someone,

There was an odd expression on his face, the look of an effort not to look frightened.

those who represented a hand lowered to pull him up, and those who represented a back bent to let him climb.

Words were a commitment, carrying implications which they did not wish to face.

He kept describing circles around Taggart, as if trying to acquire a suntan by means of an occasional ray, his wistful smile pleading to be noticed.

“That’s very smart, but you’re going to get too smart one of these days.” “If I do, you just go ahead and make the most of it,

I’m the woman in this family now.” “That’s quite all right,” said Dagny. “I’m the man.”

He could not find a single straight statement in the conversation of the men; whatever subject they seemed to be talking about never seemed to be the subject they were actually discussing. He listened like a foreigner who recognized some of the words, but could not connect them into sentences.

Your manners have never been glued to you too solidly—you always lose them in an emergency, and that’s the time when one needs them most.”

“Be careful, James. If you try to pretend that you don’t understand me, I’m going to make it much clearer.”

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who 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 it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor—your claim upon the energy of the men who produce.

“Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

Money is made—before it can be looted or mooched—made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability.

An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.

the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward.

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek.

If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him.

The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: ‘Account overdrawn.’

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?’ You are.

Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.

“if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders—what would you tell him to do?” “I . . . don’t know. What . . . could he do? What would you tell him?” “To shrug.”

It was a smile of radiant amusement, the silent laughter of a clear, young spirit greeting a moment it was glad to have lived.

The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on.

the justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil.

I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic. I do not surrender my reason or deal with men who surrender theirs.

you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you—you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body.

The military march boomed through the silence with the inflexible gaiety of a grinning skull.

For the moment, their only certainty was that they had to escape from that cellar—the cellar where the living generator was left tied by the side of the dead one.