Best 276 quotes in «atlas shrugged quotes» category

The hours ahead, like all her nights with him, would be added, she thought, to that savings account of one’s life where moments of time are stored in the pride of having been lived.

...the informality of his posture, combined with the strict formality of his clothes, gave him an air of superlative elegance. His was the only face that had the carefree look and the brilliant smile proper to the enjoyment of a party; but his eyes seemed intentionally expressionless, holding no trace of gaiety, showing—like a warning signal—nothing but the activity of a heightened perceptiveness.

The human shapes moving past him in the streets of the city were physical objects without any meaning.

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

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

The man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises—because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him.

The man who entered was a stranger. He was young, tall, and something about him suggested violence, though she could not say what it was, because the first trait one grasped about him was a quality of self-control that seemed almost arrogant.

The men I was fighting were impotent. The shiftless, the purposeless, the irresponsible, the irrational—it was not I who needed them, it was not theirs to dictate terms to me, it was not mine to obey demands.

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.

The punishment she had wanted to inflict on him was the torture of shame; what she had inflicted was the torture of boredom.

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

There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value. All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.

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.

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 escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

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.

...there’s nothing of any importance in life—except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It’s the only measure of human value.

There’s no way to make the irrational work.

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

There was a time when men were afraid that somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to their fellows. Nowadays, they’re afraid that somebody will name what everybody knows.

...there was no guilt in his face, no doubt, nothing but the calm of an inviolate self-confidence.

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

Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think - not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment - on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict ‘It is.

This, in every hour and every issue, is your basic moral choice: thinking or non-thinking, existence or non-existence, A or non-A, entity or zero.

...this sense of eagerness, of hope and of secret excitement. It was as if normal existence were a photograph of shapeless things in badly printed colors, but this was a sketch done in a few sharp strokes that made things seem clean, important—and worth doing.

This was men’s moral code in the outer world, a code that told them to act on the premise of one another’s weakness, deceit and stupidity, and this was the pattern of their lives, this struggle through a fog of the pretended and unacknowledged, this belief that facts are not solid or final, this state where, denying any form to reality, men stumble through life, unreal and unformed, and die having never been born.

...this was the simple essence of his universe: the instantaneous refusal to submit to disaster, the irresistible drive to fight it, the triumphant feeling of his own ability to win.

Those who wish to deal with me, must do so on my terms or not at all. I do not make terms with incompetence.

Thought—he told himself quietly—is a weapon one uses in order to act. No action was possible. Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice. No choice was left to him. Thought sets one’s purpose and the way to reach it. In the matter of his life being torn piece by piece out of him, he was to have no voice, no purpose, no way, no defense.

Through all the ages the mind has been regarded as evil, and every form of insult: from heretic to materialist to exploiter—every form of iniquity: from exile to disfranchisement to expropriation—every form of torture: from sneers to rack to firing squad—have been brought down upon those who assumed the responsibility of looking at the world through the eyes of a living consciousness and performing the crucial act of a rational connection. Yet only to the extent to which—in chains, in dungeons, in hidden corners, in the cells of philosophers, in the shops of traders—some men continued to think, only to that extent was humanity able to survive.

Through the dry phrases of calculations in her mind, she noticed that she did have time to feel something: it was the hard, exhilarating pleasure of action.

Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically.

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.

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.

To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct.

Two things were impossible to him: to stand still or to move aimlessly.

Watching Larkin’s efforts, Rearden felt what he did when he watched an ant struggling under the load of a matchstick. It’s so hard for him, thought Rearden, and so easy for me.

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.

...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...

We will not deal with men on any terms but ours—and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others. We do not seek to force our code upon them. They are free to believe what they please.

...What are you laughing at?” “It’s wonderful.” “What?” “The way you don’t react as everybody else does nowadays.

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.

Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end.

What glory can there be in the conquest of a mindless body?

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.

When he did not smile, his face looked inanimate, only his eyes remained alive, active with a cold, brilliant clarity of perception.

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer.

When the train stopped, when she got off and heard the concrete of the platform under her heels, she felt light, lifted, impelled to action. She started off, walking fast, as if the speed of her steps could give form to the things she felt.

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.

When you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction.