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“The minister said last Sunday that we must always reach for the best within us. What do you suppose is the best within us?” “I don’t know.” “We’ll have to find out.” She did not answer; she was looking away, up the railroad track.
“But we haven’t met a schedule for the last six months. We haven’t completed a run without some sort of breakdown, major or minor. We’re losing all our shippers, one after another. How long can we last?” “You’re a pessimist, Eddie. You lack faith. That’s what undermines the morale of an organization.”
She thought: For just a few moments—while this lasts—it is all right to surrender completely—to forget everything and just permit yourself to feel. She thought: Let go—drop the controls—this is it.
“Married people don’t look as if they have a bedroom on their minds when they look at each other. In this world, either you’re virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.”
“It’s really very simple. If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It’s no more than a fact and it has cost you nothing. But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She’s earned it, it’s a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake—and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your
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Don’t switch the blame to her, that’s the oldest trick of all cowards—you’re guilty—no matter what she does, it’s nothing compared to your guilt—she’s right—it makes you sick, doesn’t it, to know it’s she who’s right?—let it make you sick, you damn adulterer—it’s she who’s right!
if an applicant for a loan ever mentioned his personal need or any personal feeling whatever, the interview ended and he was never given another chance to speak to Mr. Mulligan.
name a person more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity. “The man who uses another’s pity for him as a weapon.”
Dagny heard a cold, implacable voice saying somewhere within her: Remember it—remember it well—it is not often that one can see pure evil—look at it—remember—and some day you’ll find the words to name its essence. . . .
By the essence and nature of existence, contradictions cannot exist. If you find it inconceivable that an invention of genius should be abandoned among ruins, and that a philosopher should wish to work as a cook in a diner—check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.”
action is man’s foremost obligation, regardless of anything he feels—she
I can’t understand their game, but this much is right: We must not see the world as they want us to see it. It’s some sort of fraud, very ancient and very vast—and the key to break it is: to check every premise they teach us, to question every precept, to—”
What if we did skip a few technicalities? It was for a good purpose. Everyone agrees that anything you do is good, so long as it’s not for yourself. . . .
A tail of figures kept trailing and shifting behind him, as if their function were to give him the pleasure of ignoring them. Mr. Mowen flickered briefly among the tail, and Dr. Pritchett, and Balph Eubank. The most persistent one was Paul Larkin. 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.
Among the many things that Lillian resented, the impersonal politeness of Dagny’s face was the one she resented most.
An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.
“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants:
no man may be smaller than his money.
“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 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 that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who 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 than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your
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“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. 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
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Blood, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other—and your time is running out.”
“I mean much more than just your judgment of me. That woman and all those like her keep evading the thoughts which they know to be good. You keep pushing out of your mind the thoughts which you believe to be evil. They do it, because they want to avoid effort. You do it, because you won’t permit yourself to consider anything that would spare you. They indulge their emotions at any cost. You sacrifice your emotions as the first cost of any problem. They are willing to bear nothing. You are willing to bear anything. They keep evading responsibility. You keep assuming it. But don’t you see that
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“Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?” said Dr. Ferris. “We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against—then you’ll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We’re after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you’d better get wise to it. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes
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They would do it, because they would be told to forget, as a sin, that which had made them cheer Hank Rearden.
Well, the man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures—which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value.”
But, in fact, a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself.
“I think,” said the pallid man with the mustache, his voice unexpectedly confident, “that we should now hear from Miss Taggart.” He leaned forward with a look of hopeful craftiness. As Dagny did not answer, but merely turned to him, he asked, “What do you have to say, Miss Taggart?” “Nothing.” “I beg your pardon?” “All I had to say was contained in the report which Jim has read to you.” She spoke quietly, her voice clear and flat. “But you did not make any recommendations.” “I have none to make.” “But, after all, as our Operating Vice-President, you have a vital interest in the policies of
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“It seems to me . . . It is, I think . . . It must, in my opinion . . . If we were to suppose . . . I am merely suggesting . . . I am not implying, but . . . If we consider both sides . . . It is, in my opinion, indubitable . . . It seems to me to be an unmistakable fact . . .”
“They won’t,” said Fred Kinnan. “Your kind of intellectuals are the first to scream when it’s safe—and the first to shut their traps at the first sign of danger. They spend years spitting at the man who feeds them—and they lick the hand of the man who slaps their drooling faces. Didn’t they deliver every country of Europe, one after another, to committees of goons, just like this one here? Didn’t they scream their heads off to shut out every burglar alarm and to break every padlock open for the goons? Have you heard a peep out of them since? Didn’t they scream that they were the friends of
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If I had not known that my life depends on my mind and my effort—he was saying soundlessly to the line of men stretched through the centuries—if I had not made it my highest moral purpose to exercise the best of my effort and the fullest capacity of my mind in order to support and expand my life, you would have found nothing to loot from me, nothing to support your own existence: It is not my sins that you’re using to injure me, but my virtues—my virtues by your own acknowledgment, since your own life depends on them, since you need them, since you do not seek to destroy my achievement but to
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the punishment that required the victim’s own virtue as the fuel to make it work—his
Now, looking from the memory of the girl on the flatcar to the Gift Certificate lying on his desk, he felt as if the two met in a single shock, fusing all the days and doubts he had lived between them, and, by the glare of the explosion, in a moment’s vision of a final sum, he saw the answer to all his questions. He thought: Guilty?—guiltier than I had known, far guiltier than I had thought, that day—guilty of the evil of damning as guilt that which was my best. I damned the fact that my mind and body were a unit, and that my body responded to the values of my mind. I damned the fact that joy
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The college had taught him that the purpose of ideas is to fool those who are stupid enough to think.
was an elderly school teacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil, that a majority may do anything it pleases, that they must not assert their own personalities, but must do as others were doing.
was a sniveling little neurotic who wrote cheap little plays into which, as a social message, he inserted cowardly little obscenities to the effect that all businessmen were scoundrels.
Taggart’s scream rose
She glanced at the conductor. She saw nothing in his face except the blind malevolence of pain, of some long-repressed anger that broke out upon the first object available, almost without consciousness of the object’s identity. The two men were not human beings to each other any longer.
“Any man who’s afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat who’s in a business where he doesn’t belong. To me—the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good. That’s what I’ve always thought and—say, what are you laughing at?”
No, I haven’t given up. I merely got fed up with the job of running a slaughter house, where one drains blood out of healthy living beings and pumps it into gutless half-corpses.”
The businessman who wishes to gain a market by throttling a superior competitor, the worker who wants a share of his employer’s wealth, the artist who envies a rival’s higher talent—they’re all wishing facts out of existence, and destruction is the only means of their wish. If they pursue it, they will not achieve a market, a fortune or an immortal fame—they will merely destroy production, employment and art. A wish for the irrational is not to be achieved, whether the sacrificial victims are willing or not. But men will not cease to desire the impossible and will not lose their longing to
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revolting handsomeness belonging to the esthetic standards of barroom corners; his blurred brown eyes had the empty flatness of glass.
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. “It
She could detect no particular expression, it was simply a face in natural repose—and the clarity seemed to come from its structure, from the precision of its sharp planes, the firmness of the mouth, the steadiness of the eyes. She could not decipher the expression of the eyes, it seemed incongruous, it resembled the calm, not of a woman, but of a scholar, it had that peculiar, luminous quality which is the fearlessness of satisfied knowledge.
For the flash of one instant, she grasped the unthinkable fact of a man who was guilty and knew it and was trying to escape by inducing an emotion of guilt in his victim.
“Whenever anyone accuses some person of being ‘unfeeling,’ he means that that person is just.
“To place nothing—nothing—above the verdict of my own mind.”
“The knowledge that my life is the highest of values, too high to give up without a fight.”
“It was a chain of coincidences, as any statistical curve of probabilities can easily prove. It is unpatriotic to spread rumors exaggerating the power of the people’s enemies.”
You’ve never suffered, the dead stare of the eyes was saying, you’ve never felt anything, because only to suffer is to feel—there’s no such thing as joy, there’s only pain and the absence of pain; only pain and the zero, when one feels nothing—I suffer,
