ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

QUOTES FOR DISCUSSION

Part 1, chapter one

Who is John Galt?

Pg. 3

"Go get your cup of coffee," he said, handing the dime to the shadow that had no face.

Pg. 3

Part 1, chapter two

He never felt loneliness except when he was happy.

Pg. 29

He wanted to utter an angry denial, but she was smiling at him as if this were merely a conversational joke, and he had no capacity for the sort of conversations which were not supposed to be meant, so he did not answer.

Pg. 33

They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved.

Pg. 37

He knew that it was necessary to have a man to protect him from the legislature; all industrialists had to employ such men. But he had never given much attention to this aspect of his business; he could not quite convince himself that it was necessary.

Pg. 40

Part 1, chapter three

He could talk as he did not talk anywhere else, admitting things he would not confess to anyone, thinking aloud, looking into the attentive eyes of the worker across the table.

Pg. 62

Part 1, chapter four

She had been proved right so eloquently, she had thought, that comments were unnecessary. 

Pg. 76

"Why don't you want to fight?"

"Because they had the right to do it."

Pg. 77

"I don't care what the courts decide. I promised to obey the majority. I have to obey."

Pg. 77

Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best.

Pg. 78

"You and I will always be there to save the country from the consequences of their actions."

Pg. 84

Part 1, chapter five

She felt pleasure from the dull, hot pain in her cheek and from the taste of blood in the corner of her mouth. She felt pleasure in what she suddenly grasped about him, about herself and about his motive.

Pg. 100

When she came home, she told her mother that she had cut her lip by falling against a rock. It was the only lie she ever told. She did not do it to protect Francisco; she did it because she felt, for some reason which she could not define, that the incident was a secret too precious to share.

Pg. 101

All right, Taggart transcontinental, now it's a race. Let's see who will do greater honor, you - to Nat Taggart,  or I - to Sebastian d'Anconia.

Pg. 101

The first ball is the most romantic event of one's life.

Pg. 103

She knew that fear was useless, that he would do what he wished, that the decision was his, that he left nothing possible to her except the thing she wanted most - to submit.

Pg. 108

It was a smile that told her he was in control of himself, of her, of everything, and ordered her to forget what she had seen in that first moment.

Pg. 112

I wish I could tell you what a relief it is to see a face that's intelligent though a woman's.

Pg. 118

Now the planners are asking their people not to blame the government, but to blame the depravity of the rich, because I turned out to be an irresponsible playboy, instead of the greedy capitalist I was expected to be.

Pg. 123

That money went to men who grow rich by such methods. Such men do not remain rich for long. The money will go into channels which will carry it, not to the most productive, but to the most corrupt. By the standards of our time, the man who has the least to offer is the man who wins.

Pg. 124

Part 1, chapter six

When a problem came up at the mills, his first concern was to discover what error he had made; he did not search for anyone's fault but his own; it was of himself that he demanded perfection. He would grant himself no mercy now; he took the blame.

Pg. 128

The editorial said that at a time of dwindling production, shrinking markets and vanishing opportunities to make a living, it was unfair to let one man hoard several business enterprises, while others had none; it was destructive to let a few corner all the resources, leaving others no chance; competition was essential to society, and it was societies duty to see that no competitor ever rose beyond the range of anybody who wanted to compete with him.

Pg. 130

"The philosophers of the past were superficial," Dr. Pritchett went on. "It remained for our century to redefine the purpose of philosophy. The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find the meaning of life, but to prove to them that there isn't any."

Pg. 132

They say he hides in one of those Norwegian fjords where neither God nor man will ever find him. That's where the Vikings used to hide in the Middle Ages.

Pg. 152

Part 1, chapter seven

She had stopped for blank moments and the middle of her office, paralyzed by despair at the rigidity of time which she could not stretch any further - on a day when urgent appointments had succeeded one another...

Pg. 165

It was useless to argue, she thought, and to wonder about people who would neither refute an argument nor accept it. 

Pg. 183

"... they're calling it a victory for anti-greed."

She laughed aloud. "I can see where such a distortion of the English language would make you furious," he said.

Pg. 213

Part 1, chapter eight

People said it because other people said it. They did not know why it was being said and heard everywhere. They did not give or ask for reasons.

Pg. 228

"There are no objective facts," he had said. "Every report on facts is only somebody's opinion. It is, therefore, useless to write about facts."

Pg. 229

Part 1, chapter nine

It's the worst government in any state. The laziest. It does nothing - outside of keeping law courts and a police department. It doesn't do anything for the people. It doesn't help anybody. I don't see why all our best companies want to run there.

Pg. 271

That book said that there was a time when men were thinking of it - they worked on it, they spent years on experiments, but they couldn't solve it and they gave it up. It was forgotten for generations. I didn't think that any living scientists ever thought of it now. But someone did. Someone has solved it, now, today!

Pg. 289

"Those men, long ago, tried to invent a motor that would draw static electricity from the atmosphere, convert it and create its own power as it went along. They couldn't do it. They gave it up." She pointed at the broken shape. "But there it is."

Pg. 289

By what right are they all doing it? By what right?

Pg. 299

I don't want to run the national economy! I want your national economy runners to leave me alone!

Pg. 299

Part 1, chapter ten

Pipe down - keep down - slow down - don't do your best, it is not wanted!

Pg. 301

I intended to ship you the ore, so you can't blame me, because my intention was completely honest.

Pg. 301

I granted them the loan for the purchase of that factory, because they needed the money. If people needed money, that was enough for me. Need was my standard, Miss Taggart. Need, not greed.

Pg. 310

…it was as if a New York skyscraper had vanished one night, leaving nothing behind but a vacant lot on a street corner.

Pg. 316

Part 2, chapter 1

No, no, but the sudden disappearance of a major supply wrought havoc in the entire oil market. So the government had to assume control and impose oil rationing on the country, in order to protect the essential enterprises.

Pg. 344

The feeblest imbecile should be able to see the glaring contradictions in every one of your statements."

"Let's put it this way, Dr. Stadler: the man who doesn't see that, deserves to believe all my statements."

Pg. 346

She had screamed when Ellis Wyatt went; she had gasped when Andrew Stockton retired; when she heard that Lawrence Hammond quit, she asked impassively, "Who's next?"

Pg. 350

Part 2, chapter one

The boy had no inkling of any concept of morality; it had been bred out of him by his college...

Pg. 362

When he had grasped the implications of his laughter, he had known that he was now condemned to constant vigilance against himself. Like the survivor of a heart attack, he knew that he had had a warning and that he carried within him a dangerous that could strike him at any moment.

Pg. 363

You ask too many why's.

Pg. 364

I could tell you - as my reason - that I do not wish to sell my Metal to those whose purpose is kept secret from me. I created that Metal.

Pg. 365

But there can be no justification for a society in which a man is expected to manufacturer the weapons for his own murderers.

Pg. 365

Drive down there with your trucks - like any other looter, but without his risk, because I won’t shoot you, as you know I can't - take as much of the Metal as you wish and go. Don't try to send me payment. I won't accept it. ... You need my help to make it look like a sale - like a safe, just, moral transaction. I will not help you.

Pg. 366

Part 2, chapter two

But both, unknown to each other, were drawing a mental chart of the faces they saw, classifying them under two headings which, if named, would have read: "Favor" and "Fear." There were men whose presence signified a special protection extended to James Taggart, and men whose presence confessed a desire to avoid his hostility -

Pg. 393

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 principal that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. ... Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you considered evil?

Pg. 410

Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor - your claim upon the energy of men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

Pg. 410

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.

Pg. 410

Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.

Pg. 411

Is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligence at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent?

Pg. 411

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.

Pg. 411

To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will.

Pg. 411

Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they're worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain not their loss - the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery - that you must offer them values, not wounds - that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find.

Pg. 411

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. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent.

Pg. 411

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

Pg. 412

Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices.

Pg. 412

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 Society is doomed.

Pg. 413

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.

Pg. 413

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.

Pg. 413

To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money - and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being - the self-made man - the American industrialist.

Pg. 414

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose - because it contains all the others - the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money'. No other language or nation had ever used those words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

Pg. 414

I don't have any answers, my mind doesn't work that way, but I don't feel that you're right, so I know that you're wrong.

Pg. 415

I don't know, we'll have to see, we'll have to decide whether we'll permit you to make any profits or not.

Pg. 421

Money is the root of all evil - so I just got tired of being evil.

Pg. 422

Part 2, chapter three

Hank, I knew you were married. I knew what I was doing. I chose to do it. There's nothing that you owe me, no duty that you have to consider.

Pg. 425

My way of trading is to know that the joy you give me is paid for by the joy you get from me - not by your suffering or mine. I don't accept sacrifices and I don't make them.

Pg. 425

If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud. You don't do it in business, Hank. Don't do it in your own life.

Pg. 425

Do you know your only real guilt? With the greatest capacity for it, you've never learned to enjoy yourself.

Pg. 427

Then I want you to come home and face the only person who knows you for what you really are, who knows the actual value of your word, of your honor, of your integrity, of your vaunted self-esteem. I want you to face, in your own home, the one person who despises you and has the right to do so.

Pg. 431

Somewhere outside of him and apart, as if he were reading it in a brain not his own, he observed the thought that there was some flaw in the scheme of the punishment she wanted him to bear, something wrong by its own terms, aside from its propriety or justice, some practical miscalculation that would demolish it all if discovered.

Pg. 431

I don't want to help the looters to pretend that private property still exists.

Pg. 446

When you strain your energy to its utmost in order to produce the best, do you expect to be rewarded for it or punished? ... If you were punished, instead -what sort of code have you accepted?

Pg. 452

... whining rotters who never rouse themselves to any effort, who do not possess the ability of a filing clerk, but demand the income of a company president, who drift from failure to failure and expect you to pay their bills, who hold their wishing as an equivalent of your work and their need as a higher claim to reward than your effort,

Pg. 453

You take pride in setting no limit to your endurance, Mr. Rearden, because you think that you are doing right. What if you aren't? What if you're placing your virtue in the service of evil and letting it become a tool for the destruction of everything you love, respect and admire?

Pg. 453

"...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 up the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - what would you tell him to do?"

"... What would you tell him?"

"To shrug."

Pg. 455

He saw Francisco giving orders to the men around him. They did not know who he was or where he came from, but they listened: they knew he was a man who knew his job.

Pg. 459 

Part 2, chapter four 

I've tried never to remind you that you're living on my charity. I thought that it was your place to remember it.

Pg. 469

"...I just wanted to say...because tomorrow is your trial...and whatever they do to you is supposed to be in the name of all the people... I just wanted to say that I...that it won't be in my name... even if there's nothing I can do about it, except to tell you... even if I know that doesn't mean anything."

"It means much more than you suspect."

Pg. 473

...if it had not been for men who broke regulations and hampered the government's plans, prosperity would have been achieved long ago;

Pg. 476

...if they believe that they may seize my property simply because they need it - well, so does any burglar. There is only this difference: the burglar does not ask me to sanction his act.

Pg. 477

I will not help you to preserve an appearance of righteousness where rights are not recognized. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of rationality by entering a debate in which a gun is the final argument. I will not help you to pretend that you are administering justice.

Pg. 479

Part 2, chapter five

When people were starving, said the newspapers, one did not have to feel concern over the failures of business enterprises which were only private ventures for private profit.

Pg. 497

"Storms are an act of God," wrote Bertram Scudder, "and nobody can be held socially responsible for the weather."

Pg. 498

Maybe you can't afford to give them a raise, but how can they afford to exist when the cost of living has shot sky-high? They've got to eat, don't they?... A government that would bring the railroad rates down would make a lot of folks grateful.

Pg. 504

You wouldn't want the government to start telling you how to run your railroad, would you?... Our job is only to see that the people get fair wages and decent transportation.

Pg. 506

... He was told that the river steamboat concerns had filed suit against him demanding that his bridge be destroyed as a threat to the public welfare.  ... That same day, a local mob attacked the structure and set fire to the wooden scaffolding. His workers deserted him, some because they were scared, some because they were bribed by the steamboat people, and most of them because he had no money to pay them for weeks. ... and the bridge would be ordered torn down by the time he completed it. ... He knelt, he picked up the tools his men had left and he started to clear the charred wreckage away from the steel structure. ... He worked there all night. By morning, he had thought out a plan of what he would you do to find the right man, the men of independent judgment - to find them, to convince them, to raise the money, to continue the bridge.

Pg. 513

The weather seemed afraid to take a stand and clung non-committally to some sort of road's middle; Board of Directors' weather, she thought. 

Pg. 518

They had been buying machinery for doubtful owners in sales of dubious legality, since nobody could tell who had the right to dispose of the great, dead properties, and nobody would come to challenge the transactions.

Pg. 518

Part 2, chapter six

They had not heard the text of Directive No. 10 - 289, but they knew what it would contain.

Pg. 536

The family's diplomas had always hung on the wall in the manner of a reproach to the world, because the diplomas had not automatically produced the material equivalents of their attested spiritual value.

Pg. 537

Part 2, chapter seven

The police have been arresting them for leaving their jobs -they're called deserters - but there's too many of them and no food to feed them in jail, so nobody gives a damn anymore, one way or another.

Pg. 567

He felt, with a touch of mirthless amusement, that the gun had been needed at the mills, not in the peaceful safety of loneliness and night; what could some starving vagrant take from him, compared to what had been taken by men who claimed to be his protectors?

Pg. 572

When robbery is done in open daylight by sanction of the law, as it is done today, then any act of honor or restitution has to be hidden underground.

Pg. 573

I am merely complying with a system which my fellow men have established. If they believe that force is the proper means to deal with one another, I am giving them what they ask for.

Pg. 575

Robin Hood... He was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. Well, I am the man who…robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich.

Pg. 576

It is said that he fought against the looting rulers and returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is not the meaning of legend which has survived. He is remembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of need, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the poor.

Pg. 577

What I actually am, Mr. Rearden, is a policeman. It is a policeman's duty to protect men from criminals - criminals being those who seize wealth by force. It is a policeman's duty to retrieve stolen property and return it to its owners.

Pg. 577

There had been a time when he had been expected to think. Now, they did not want him to think, only to obey.

Pg. 598

Part 2, chapter eight

"Do you feel that you've betrayed Taggart Transcontinental?"

"No. I... I feel that I would have betrayed it by remaining at work."

Pg. 616

Dagny, we who have been called ‘materialists’ by the killers of the human spirit, we're the only ones who know how little value or meaning there is in material objects as such, because we're the ones who create their value and meaning.

Pg. 620

Wherever you are, you will always be able to produce. But the looters - by their own stated theory - are in desperate, permanent, congenital need and at the blind mercy of matter.

Pg. 620

Part 2, chapter nine

The silence of her apartment and the motionless perfection of objects that had remained just as she had left them a month before, struck her with a sense of relief and desolation together, when she entered her living room. The silence gave her an illusion of privacy and ownership;

Pg. 633

She had left the office earlier than she intended, unable to summon the effort for any task that could be postponed till morning. This was new to her - and it was new that she could now feel more at home in her apartment than in her office.

Pg. 633

"I'm not making terms with them. They need me. They know it. It's my terms that I'll make them accept."

"By playing a game in which they gain benefits in exchange for harming you?"

Pg. 636

"Within the extent of your knowledge," Francisco said quietly, "you are right."

Pg. 641

Part 2, chapter ten

She thought of what a difference one month had made. ... The track workers, the switchmen, the yardmen, who always greeted her, anywhere along the line, their cheerful grins boasting that they knew who she was - had now looked at her stonily, turning away, their faces wary and closed. She wanted to cry to them in apology, "It's not I who’ve done it to you!" -then had remembered that she had accepted it and that they now had the right to hate her, that she was both a slave and a driver of slaves, and so was every human being in the country, and hatred was the only thing that men could now feel for one another.

Pg. 654

I think I've heard of you, ma'am - in the old days. ... You were the lady who ran a railroad.

Pg. 657

The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need.

Pg. 660

None of us knew just how the plan would work, but every one of us thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had doubts, he felt guilty and kept his mouth shut - because they made it sound like anyone who'd opposed the plan was a child killer at heart and less than a human. They told us that this plan would achieve a noble ideal.

Pg. 661

They voted which men were the best, and these men were sentenced to work overtime each night for the next six months. Overtime without pay - because you weren't paid by time and you weren't paid by work, only by need.

Pg. 662

We began to hide whatever ability we had, just slow down and watch like hawks that we never worked any faster or better than the next fellow. What else could we do, when we knew that if we did our best for 'the family,' it's not thanks or rewards that we get, but punishment?

Pg. 662

Drink, of course, was what we all turned to, some more, some less. Don't ask how we got the money for it. When all the decent pleasures are forbidden, there's always ways to get the rotten ones. You don't break into grocery stores after dark and you don't pick your fellow's pockets to buy classical symphonies or fishing tackle, but if it's to get stinking drunk and forget - you do.

Pg. 664

In fact, the best chance you had of getting a raise and breathing easier for a while was a 'baby allowance.' Either that, or a major disease.

Pg. 664

But the shiftless and the irresponsible had a field day of it. They bred babies, they got girls in trouble, they dragged in every worthless relative they had from all over the country, every unmarried pregnant sister, for an extra ‘disability allowance,’ they got more sicknesses than any doctor could disprove, they ruined their clothing, their furniture, their homes - what the hell, 'the family' was paying for it! They found more ways of getting in 'need' than the rest of us could ever imagine - they developed a special skill for it, which was the only ability they showed.

Pg. 664

I will stop the motor of the world.

Pg. 671

...when it began to look as if some silent power were stopping the generators of the world and the world was crumbling quietly, like a body when its spirit is gone - then we began to wonder and to ask questions about him. We began to ask it of one another, those of us who had heard him say it.

Pg. 671

...the motor was needed, not to move trains, but to keep her moving.

Pg. 672

They went the length of the train, finding no porters, no waiters in the diner, no brakemen, no conductor. They glanced at each other once in a while, but kept silent. They knew the stories of abandoned trains, of the crews that vanished in sudden bursts of rebellion against serfdom.

Pg. 674

The earth was falling downward, and she felt as if its weight were dropping off her ankles, as if the globe would go shrinking to the size of a ball, a convict's ball she had dragged and lost.

Pg. 690

There was nothing to support her but the beat of the engine and the minds of the man who had made the plane. But what else supports one anywhere?

Pg. 691

Part 3, chapter one

"You know me?" Her voice was impersonal and hard.

"I've known you for many years."

"Have I known you?"

"Yes, I think so."

"What's your name?"

"John Gault."

Pg. 702

Refractor rays...By the same method as a mirage on a desert: an image reflected from a layer of heated air. ...a screen of rays... You hit the ray screen. Some of the rays are the kind that kill magnetic motors.

Pg. 704

...we have no laws in this valley, no rules no formal organization of any kind. We come here because we want rest. But we have certain customs, which we all observe, because they pertain to the things we need rest from. So I'll warn you now that there is one word which is forbidden in this valley: the word 'give.'

Pg. 714

There's no such thing as a lousy job - only lousy men who don't care to do it.

Pg. 721

I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

Pg. 731

I should demonstrate that humanity's darkest evil, the most destructive horror machine among all the devices of men, is non-objective law.

Pg. 737

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. Well, their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function.

Pg. 738

The pursuit of wealth is greed, the root of all evil? We did not seek to make fortunes any longer. It is evil to earn more than one's bare sustenance? We take nothing but the lowliest jobs and we produce, by the effort of our muscles, no more than we consume for our immediate needs - with not a penny nor an inventive thought leftover to harm the world. It is evil to succeed, since success is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? We have ceased burdening the week with our ambition and have left them free to prosper without us.

Pg. 741

…I could not share my profession with men who claim that the qualification of an intellectual consists of denying the existence of the intellect. 

Pg. 741

I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago... Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciatingly devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. 

Pg. 744

I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, they discussed everything - except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the 'welfare' of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it.

Pg. 744

That a man who’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards - never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy.

Pg. 744

"We had no rules of any kind," said Galt, "except one. When a man took our oath, it meant a single commitment: not to work in his own profession, not to give the world the benefit of his mind. Each of us carried it out in a manner that he chose.

Pg. 747

So we came to set aside one month a year to spend in the valley - to rest, to live in a rational world, to bring our real work out of hiding, to trade our achievements - here, where achievements meant  payment, not expropriation. Each of us built his own house here, at his own expense - for one month of life out of twelve. It made the eleven easier to bear.

Pg. 747

Whatever part of their wealth they could salvage, they converted into gold or machines,

Pg. 747

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.

Pg. 748

"We never demand agreement," he said. "We never tell anyone more than he's ready to hear."

Pg. 749

Now you know the exact nature of the choice you'll have to make. If it seems hard, it's because you still think that it does not have to be one or the other. You will learn that it does.

Pg. 749

Part 3, chapter two

Sebastian d'Anconia committed one error: he accepted a system which declared that the property he had earned by right, was to be his, not by right, but by permission. His descendants paid for that error. I have made the last payment...

Pg. 771

I may see it, but I cannot be certain. No man can predict the time when others will choose to return to reason.

Pg. 771

You know, of course, that there can be no collective commitments in this valley and that families or relatives are not allowed to come here, unless each person takes the striker's oath by his own independent conviction. I came here, not merely for the sake of my husband's profession, but for the sake of my own. 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 is unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror.

Pg. 785

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...

Pg. 786

He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence - by his own choice.

Pg. 791

-she thought of the world's code that worshipped white lies as an act of mercy - she felt a stab of revulsion against that code, suddenly seeing its full ugliness for the first time-

Pg. 794

…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? There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another - if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't.

Pg. 798

No one's happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.

Pg. 798

"You're leaving as our friend," said Midas Mulligan, "and we'll be fighting everything you'll do, because we know you're wrong, but it's not you that we'll be damning."

Pg. 807

"You are certain that I have made the wrong decision?"

"I am."

"Do you believe that one must be responsible for one's own errors?"

"I do."

"Then why aren't you letting me bear the consequences of mine?"

"I am and you will."

"If I find, when it is too late, that I want to return to this valley - why should you have to bear the risk of keeping that door open to me?"

"I don't have to. I wouldn't do it if I had no selfish end to gain."

"What's selfish end?"

"I want you here."

Pg. 811

Part 3, chapter three

The country is full of rumors, all sorts of rumors, about everything, all of them dangerous. Disruptive, I mean. People seem to do nothing but whisper. They don't believe the newspapers, they don't believe the best speakers, they believe every vicious, scare-mongering piece of gossip that comes floating around. There's no confidence left, no faith, no order, no... no respect for authority.

Pg. 844

…I take my hat off to you in regard to the price you exacted, which none of your sisters could ever have hoped to match.

Pg. 849

She knew dimly that this was the real Hank Rearden, and no matter what form of insulting cruelty he had once given to their first nights together, no matter how often she had seemed as the stronger of the two, this has always been within him and at the root of their bond - this strength of his which would protect her if ever hers were gone.

Pg. 855

I loved you from the first day I saw you, on a flatcar on a siding of Milford Station. I loved you when we rode in the cab of the first engine on the John Galt Line. I loved you on the gallery of Ellis Wyatt's house. I loved you on that next morning. You knew it. But it's I who must say it to you, as I'm saying it now - if I am to redeem all those days and to let them be fully what they were for both of us. I loved you. You knew it. I didn't. And because I didn't, I had to learn it when I sat at my desk and looked at the Gift Certificate for Rearden Metal.

Pg. 857

I had cut myself in two, as the mystics preached, and I ran my business by one code of rules, but my own life by another.

Pg. 858

Part 3, chapter four

She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted.

Pg. 876

I don't trust anyone around me, I have nothing but enemies, I am very lonely. Don't you know that I need you?

Pg. 876

...it's for the people. That's the difference between business and politics - we have no selfish ends in view, no private motives, we're not after profit, we don't spend our lives scrambling for money, we don't have to! That's why we're slandered and misunderstood by all the greedy profit-chasers who can't conceive of a spiritual motive or moral ideal or...

Pg. 878

Part 3, chapter five

The most able - correction: the most selfish - of the men are gone.

Pg. 920

She had noticed it before, ever since her broadcast, ever since the two of them had begun to appear in public together. Instead of the disgrace he had dreaded, there was an air of awed uncertainty in people's manner - uncertainty of their own moral precepts, awe in the presence of two persons who dared to be certain of being right. People were looking at them with anxious curiosity, with envy, with respect, with the fear of offending an unknown, proudly rigorous standard, some almost with an air of apology that seemed to say: "Please forgive us for being married." There were some who had a look of angry malice, and a few who had a look of admiration.

Pg. 922

...but how can anybody take his own ideas seriously enough to destroy a fortune when people need it?

Pg. 925

An Emergency State Tax has been passed in California for the relief of the state's unemployed, in the amount of fifty per cent of any local corporation's gross income ahead of other taxes; the California oil companies have gone out of business.

Pg. 926

It's a moral imperative, universally conceded in our day and age, that every man is entitled to a job.

Pg. 929

Soybeans make an excellent substitute for bread, meat, cereals and coffee - and if all of us were compelled to add soybeans as our staple diet, it would solve the national food crisis and make it possible to feed more people. The greatest food for the greatest number - that's my slogan.

Pg. 938

Just as laymen leave medicine to doctors and electronics to engineers, so people who are not qualified to think should leave all thinking to the experts and have faith in the experts' higher authority. Only experts are able to understand the discoveries of modern science, which have proved that thought is an illusion and that the mind is a myth.

Pg. 938

Part 3, chapter five

"I think that they're crumbling and that I'll win. I can stand it just a little longer."

"True, it's just a little longer - not till you win, but till you learn."

Pg. 961

Part 3, chapter six

What's happened to you? What's changed you like that? You don't seem human anymore! You keep pressing us for answers, when we haven't any answers to give. You keep beating us with logic - what's logic at a time like this? - what's logic when people are suffering?

Pg. 972

You sit there trembling, because you know that I'm the last one left to save your lives - and you know that time is as short as that. Yet you propose a plan to destroy me, a plan which demands, with an idiot's crudeness, without loopholes, detours or escape, that I work at a loss - that I work, with every ton I pour costing me more than I'll get for it - that I feed the last of my wealth away until we all starve together.

Pg. 984

He had cursed these looters for their stubborn blindness? It was he who had made it possible.

Pg. 986

They had not been blind to reality, he had - blind to the reality he himself had created.

Pg. 987

Listen, that riot... it's staged... on orders from Washington... It's not workers... Not your workers...

Pg. 989

Somewhere, he thought, there was this boy's mother, who had trembled with protective concern over his groping steps, while teaching him to walk, who had measured his baby formulas with a jeweler's caution, ... -then had sent him to be turned into a tortured neurotic by the men who taught him that he had no mind and must never attempt to think.

Pg. 994

EDIT NEXT QUOTE

He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, ... yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, ...

Pg. 994

From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, ...

"Don't ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!"

"Who are you to think? It's so because I say so!"

"Don't argue, obey!"

"Don't try to understand, believe!"

"Don’t rebel, adjust!"

"Don't stand out, belong!"

"Don't struggle, compromise!"

"Your heart is more important than your mind!"

"Who are you to know? Your parents know best!"

"Who are you to know? Society knows best!"

"Who are you to know? The bureaucrats know best!"

Pg. 994

Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival - yet that was what they did to their children.

Pg. 995

Part 3, chapter seven

She wondered dimly why she should feel so glad that he had found liberation, so certain that he was right, and yet refuse herself the same deliverance.

Pg. 1001

There's still a chance to win, but let me be the only victim...

Pg. 1001

This is John Galt speaking. I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values.

Pg. 1009

We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties.

Pg. 1010

But someone had to think to keep you alive; if you choose to default, you default on existence and you pass the deficit to some moral man, expecting him to sacrifice his good for the sake of letting you survive by your evil.

Pg. 1015

Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

Pg. 1016

Man cannot survive except by gaining knowledge, and reason is his only means to gain it.

Pg. 1016

His means to establish the truth of his answers is logic, and logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole.

Pg. 1016

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that would you call 'free will' is your mind's freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

Pg. 1017

If you hold the irrational as your standard of value and the impossible as your concept of the good, if you long for rewards you have not earned, for a fortune or a love you don't deserve, for a loophole in the law of causality, for an A that becomes non-A at your whim, if you desire the opposite of existence - you will reach it.

Pg. 1021

Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.

Pg. 1022

Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by my own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the injury or the favor of others, but to earn it by my own achievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as the goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal of the lives of others.

Pg. 1022

Do not open your mouth to tell me that your mind has convinced you of your right to force my mind. Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.

Pg. 1023

I do not enter discussions with neighbors who think they can forbid me to think.

Pg. 1024

It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use.

Pg. 1024

He uses force to seize a value; I use it only to destroy destruction.

Pg. 1024

Joy is not ‘the absence of pain,’ intelligence is not ‘the absence of stupidity,’ light is not ‘the absence of darkness,’ an entity is not ‘the absence of a nonentity.’ Building is not done by abstaining from demolition;

Pg. 1024

Man's mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. ... whose standards are beyond man's power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. ... The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not question.

Pg. 1027

You are now seeing the climax of the creed of the uncaused and unearned.

Pg. 1044

Granting man less dignity than they grant to cattle, ignoring what an animal trainer could tell them - that no animal can be trained by fear, that a tortured elephant will trample his torturer, but will not work for him or carry his burdens...

Pg. 1044

...there is no way to please him; when you obey, he will reverse his orders; he seeks obedience for the sake of obedience and destruction for the sake of destruction. ...there is no way to buy him off, the bribe he wants is your life, as slowly or as fast as you are willing to give it in...

Pg. 1046

Then, one night at a factory meeting, I heard myself sentenced to death by reason of my achievement.

Pg. 1048

-ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food, whether you would be able to invent a wheel, a lever, an induction coil, a generator, an electronic tube - then decide whether man of ability are exploiters who live by the fruit of your labor and rob you of the wealth that you produce, and whether you dare to believe that you possess the power to enslaved them.

Pg. 1048

You praise any venture that claims to be non-profit, and damn the men who made the profits that make the venture possible. You regard as ‘in the public interest’ any project serving those who do not pay; it is not in the public interest to provide any services for those who do the paying.

Pg. 1050

The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world.

Pg. 1054

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other side is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

Pg. 1054

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win.

Pg. 1054

Once, you believed it was ‘only a compromise,’: you conceded that it was evil to live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live for your community, but moral to live for your country. Now you are letting this greatest of countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth, while you concede that it is selfish to live for your country and that your moral duty is to live for the globe.

Pg. 1055

Do not say that you're afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. Are you safer in surrendering to mystics and discarding the little that you know? Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.

Pg. 1058

This greatest of countries was built on my morality –

Pg. 1060

This country - the product of reason - could not survive on the morality of sacrifice.

Pg. 1061

We will rebuild America's system on the moral premise which had been its foundation... that man is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others, that man's life, his freedom, his happiness are his by inalienable right.

Pg. 1061

If a man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work.

Pg. 1061

You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value - you have now established an unselfish society where they trade extortion for extortion.

Pg. 1065

Now that you know the truth about your world, stop supporting your own destroyers. The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it. Withdraw your sanction. Withdraw your support. Do not try to live on your enemies’ terms or to win at a game where they're setting the rules.

Pg. 1066

Part 3, chapter eight

The wads of worthless paper money were growing heavier in the pockets of the nation, but there was less and less for that money to buy.

Pg. 1082

Don't try to open that door - she was thinking, but knew that what she was now seeing was the visual form of the statement:  Don't try to force the mind.

Pg. 1096

I think there was plenty in that speech that made sense. Yes, sir, I do. Of course, I don't agree with every word you said - but what the hell, you don't expect us to agree with everything, do you?

Pg. 1098

"Because... Because we wanted to speak to you in the name of the country."

"I don't recognize your right to speak in the name of the country."

Pg. 1099

“We want you to tell us what to do.”

“I told you what to do.”

“What?”

 “Get out of the way.”

Pg. 1099

They don't believe a word of it. Some of them say that he'll never collaborate with us. Most of them don't even believe that we've got him. I don't know what's happened to people. They don't believe anything anymore.

Pg. 1106

People are perishing - and it's you who could save them! Does it matter who's right or wrong? You should join us, even if you think we're wrong, you should sacrifice your mind to save them!

Pg. 1113

Then, with so swift and expert a movement that his secretary's  hand was unable to match it, he rose to his feet, leaning sideways, leaving the pointed gun momentarily exposed to the sight of the world - then standing straight, facing the cameras, looking at all his invisible viewers, he said: "Get the hell out of my way!"

Pg. 1125

Part 3, chapter ten

"It's the end," she said. "It's the beginning," he answered.

Pg. 1159

Film NOTES -

 Young Americans for Liberty

The Atlas Society

Students for Liberty SFL

Reason

Americans for Tax Reform ATR

Official selection of 2014 Anthem the Libertarian Film Festival

The Blaze Freedom works