Jeff Ragan’s Reviews > Atlas Shrugged > Status Update

"Here, we trade achievements, not failures - values, not needs. We're free of one another, yet we all grow together. Wealth, Dagny? What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish" (663).

"...it was new to feel protected, and to feel that it was right to accept the protection, to surrender - right, because this peculiar sense of safety was not protection against the future, but against the past, not the protection of being spared from battle, but of having won it, not a protection granted to her weakness, but to her strength..." (645).

"'I know that this stands for something.' 'The dollar sign? For a great deal. It stands on the vest of every fat, piglike figure in every cartoon, for the purpose of denoting a crook, a grafter, a scoundrel - as the one sure-fire brand of evil. It stands - as the money of a free country - for achievement, for success, for ability, for man's creative power...It stands for the initials of the United States'" (628).

"If men fall for some vicious piece of insanity, when they have no way to make it work and no possible reason to explain their choice - it's because they have a reason that they do not wish to tell" (614).

"...the harder you work the more is demanded of you, & you stand slinging buckets forty hours a week, then forty-eight, then fifty-six - for your neighbor's supper - for his wife's operation - for his child's measles...and yours to work, from sunup to sundown, month after month...with nothing in sight for you but their pleasure...From each according to his ability, to each according to his need..." (608).

"I do not wish to work in a world that regards me as a slave. I do not wish to be of any value to people. If I succeeded in rebuilding the motor, I would not let you place it in their service. I would not take it upon my conscience that anything produced by my mind should be used to bring them comfort...I will see them all die of starvation, myself included, rather than forgive them for this..." (593).

"'You wanted to know the name of that other man? The man I slept with? The man who had me first? It was Francisco d'Anconia!' She saw the force of the blow by seeing his face swept blank. She knew that if justice was her purpose, she had achieved it - because this slap was worse than the one he had dealt" (590).

"They're holding us by our love of it, and we'll go on paying so long as there's still one chance left to keep one single wheel alive and moving in token of human intelligence. We'll go on holding it afloat, like our drowning child, and when the flood swallows it, we'll go down with the last wheel and the last syllogism" (582).

"'We produced the wealth of the world - bet we let our enemies write its moral code.' 'But we never accepted their code. We lived by our own standards.' 'Yes - & paid ransoms for it! Ransoms in matter & in spirit - in money, which our enemies received, but did not deserve, & in honor, which we deserved, but did not receive...We kept mankind alive, yet we allowed men to despise us & to worship our destroyers'" (570).

"There had been a time when he had placed the safety of the passengers above his own, not by reason of love for his fellow men, but because that responsibility was part of his job, which he accepted & felt pride in fulfilling. Now, he felt a contemptuous indifference & no desire to save them. They had asked for & accepted Directive 10-289...not one of them would come forward to defend him..." (557).