Thu 4 Sep 2008
Their ineptitude came from helplessness, not malice.
(p.40 – Rearden’s family)
He never sought any loans, bonds, subsidies, land grants or legislative favors from the government. He obtained money from the men who owned it, going from door to door - from the mahogany doors of bankers to the clapboard doors of lonely farmhouses. He never talked about the public good. He merely told people that they would make big profits on his railroad.
(p.59 - Nathaniel Taggart)
“What is the most important thing on earth?”
“I’ll always bow to a coat-of-arms. I’ll always worship the symbol of nobility. Only I don’t give a damn about moth-eaten turrets and tenth-hand unicorns. The coat-of-arms of our day are to be found on billboards and in the ads of popular magazines. Industrial trademarks!”
(p.95 – Francisco D’Anconia)
“What’s the most depraved of human being?”
“The man without a purpose.”
(p.99 – Francisco D’Anconia)
“…there is 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. All the codes of ethics they’ll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that’s on a gold standard. When you grow up, you’ll know what I mean.”
(p.100 – Francisco D’Anconia)
“What is morality?”
“Judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.”
(p.117 – A Bum)
One does not bargain about inches of evil.
(p.303)
“Evil is the man who uses another’s pity for him as a weapon.”
(p.316 – Midas Mulligan)
“I am so hungry for any sight of anyone who’s able to do whatever it is he’s doing!”
(p.329)
“By the essence and nature of existence, contradictions cannot exist. If you find one, check your premises and you will find that one of them is wrong.”
(p.331 – Dr. Akston)
“The hallmark of a second rater is resentment’s for another’s man achievement.”
(p.358 - Dr. Stadler)
“You rose in my estimation when I found that you wanted me. I feel that others live up to me, if they want me.”
(p.375 – Dagny Taggart)
This is the world and the core of it, this is what made the city - they go together, the angular shapes of the buildings and the angular lines of a face stripped of everything but purpose.
(p.376 – On New York)
“[The looters] need some sort of sanction from us… I know that if we value our lives, we must not give it to them. If they put you on a torture rack, don’t give it to them. Let them destroy your railroad and my mills, but don’t give it to them. Because I know this much: I know that that’s our only chance.”
(p.378 – Hank Rearden)
“This is the great, formal, nose-counting event, where the victims come in order to show how safe it is to destroy them, and destroyers form pacts of eternal friendship, which lasts for three months.”
(p.407 – Francisco D’Anconia)
“Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.”
(p.411 – Francisco D’Anconia)
“An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.”
(p.411 – Francisco D’Anconia)
“…the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering but the exchange of goods.”
(p.411 – Francisco D’Anconia)
“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desire.”
(p.411 – Francisco D’Anconia)
“It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money - and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.”
(p.412 – Francisco D’Anconia)
“Watch money. Money is the barometer of 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 form 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 self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half loot. Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money.”
(p.413 – Francisco D’Anconia)
“When money ceases to be the tool of men, blood, whips and guns replace it.”
(p.415 – Francisco D’Anconia)
“My way of trading is to know that the joy you give me is paid for by the joy you get for me – not by your suffering or mine. I don’t accept sacrifices and I don’t make them. If you asked me for more than you meant to me, I would refuse. If you asked me give up the railroad, I’d leave you. 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.”
(p.435 - Dagny Taggart)
“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 impossible for men to live without breaking the laws. …just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on the guilt.”
(p.436 – Dr. Ferris)
“The worst guilt is to accept an undeserved guilt.”
(p.455 – Francisco D’Anconia)
“Man’s motive power is his moral code. A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue.”
(p.455 – Francisco D’Anconia)
“Any human being, who accepts help from another, knows that good will is the giver’s only motive and that good will is the payment he owes in return.”
(p.469 – Hank Rearden on his family)
“If you chose to deal with men by means of compulsion, do so. But you will discover that you need the voluntary co-operation of your victims, in many more ways than you can see at present. And your victims should discover that it is their own volition – which you cannot force – that makes you possible. …I will not help you disguise the nature of your actions.”
(p.479 – Hank Rearden)
“Just like the man who tries to replace the mind by seizing the product of the mind, the man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures.”
(p.489 – Francisco D’Anconia)
“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 evaluation of himself… He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience – or to fake – a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer – because only the possession of a heroin will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut. …He does not seek to gain his values, he seeks to express it. But a man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises… His body will always follow the ultimate logic of his deepest convictions; if he believes that flaws are values, he has damned existence as evil and only the evil will attract him. He has equated virtue with pain and he will feel that vice is the only realm of pleasure. Then he will scream that his body has vicious desires of its own which his mind cannot conquer, that sex is sin, that true love is a pure emotion of the spirit. And then he will wonder why love brings him nothing but boredom, and sex- nothing but shame. Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love.”
(p.489, 490, 491 – Francisco D’Anconia)
“If you want to defeat any kind of fraud – comply with it literally, adding nothing of your own to disguise its nature.”
(p.492 – Francisco D’Anconia)
…they were people who believed mediocrity was safe.
(p.537 – The Looters)
“I mean that there is no way to disarm any man except through guilt. Through that which he himself has accepted as guilt. If a man has ever stolen a dime, you can impose on him the punishment intended for a bank robber and he will take it. He’ll bear any form of misery, he’ll feel that he deserves no better. If there’s not enough guilt in the world, we must create it. If we teach a man that it’s evil to look at spring flowers and he believes us and then does it – we’ll be able to do whatever we please with him. He won’t defend himself. He won’t feel he’s worth it. He won’t fight. But save us from the man the man who lives up to his own standards. Save us from the man of clean conscience. He’s the man who’ll beat us.
(p.548 – Dr. Ferris)
“This is a battle that cannot be fought except with clean hands – because the enemy’s sole power is in the sores of one’s conscience…”
(p.565 – Hank Rearden)
“Your enemies are destroying you by means of your own power. Your generosity and your endurance are their only tools.”
(p.619 – Francisco D’Anconia)
“There is no such thing as a lousy job – only lousy men who don’t care to do it.”
(p.721 – Ellis Wyatt)
“We never make assertions, that is the moral crime peculiar to our enemies. We do not tell – we show. We do not claim – we prove.”
(p.735 – Hugh Akston)
There was an air of luxury about the room, but it was the luxury of expert simplicity …the wealth of selection, not of accumulation.
(p.736 – Midas Mulligan’s place in Atlantis)
Whether it’s a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one’s own eyes – which means; the capacity to perform a rational identification – which means; the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before. …An intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth.”
(p.783 – Richard Halley)
“For if there is more a tragic fool than the businessman who doesn’t know he’s an exponent of man’s highest creative spirit – it’s the artist who thinks that the businessman is his enemy.”
(p.784 – Richard Halley)
The business here had the purposeful selectiveness of art – and art – had the stern discipline of business.
(p.784 – On Atlantis)
“A prayer is a misguided attempt at a state of spirit of full, confident affirming self-dedication to my love of the right, to the certainty that the right will win.”
(p.788 – Dr. Hugh Akston)
“There is no conflict of interest among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires – if they omit the irrational from their views of the possible and destruction from the views of the practical. There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no men 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 to that which isn’t. …No one’s happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or destroy.”
(p.798 – John Galt)
“We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies. … [This is] the one tenet by which they destroy a man before he’s started, the killer-tenet: the breach between his mind and his boy.”
(p.858 – Dagny Taggart)
…honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted.
(p.876 – Cherryl Taggart)
“Whenever anyone accuses some person of being ‘unfeeling’ he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. …Well, observe that you never hear that accusation in defense of innocence, but always in defense of guilt. Justice is the opposite of charity.”
(p.889 – Dagny Taggart)
“I am not going to help you pretend – by arguing with you…”
(p.916 – Dagny Taggart)
…so long as men struggle to stay alive, they’ll never produce so little that the man with the club won’t be able to seize it and leave them still less, provided millions of them are willing to submit…
(p.948 – The philosophy of the Looters)
“…it’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering…”
(p.959 – John Galt)
…the path of their consciousness were open to disaster, but not to value.
(p.1001 – Looters Morality)
“By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man –every man – is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.”
(p.1014 – This is John Galt speaking)
“The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”
(p.1014 – This is John Galt speaking)
“No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.”
(p.1017 – This is John Galt speaking)
“Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.”
(p.1017 – This is John Galt speaking)
“To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.”
(p.1018 – This is John Galt speaking)
“…a moral commandment is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.”
(p.1018 – This is John Galt speaking)
“To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason – Purpose – Self-esteem”
(p.1018 – This is John Galt speaking)
“…the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another.”
(p.1019 – This is John Galt speaking)
“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud – that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the enemies you have to dread and flee – that you do not care to live as a dependant, least of all a dependant on the stupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling – that honesty is not a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.”
(p.1019 – This is John Galt speaking)
“Life is the reward of virtue – and happiness is the goal and reward of life.”
(p.1021 – This is John Galt speaking)
“Happiness is a state of non contradictory joy – a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your won destruction…”
(p.1022 – This is John Galt speaking)
“I win by means of nothing but logic and I surrender to nothing but logic.”
(p.1022 - This is John Galt speaking)
“I have nothing to gain from fools or cowards; I have no benefits to seek from human vices: from stupidity, dishonesty or fear. The only value men can offer me is the work of their mind. When I disagree with a rational man I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.”
(p.1023 - This is John Galt speaking)
“The name of this monstrous absurdity if Original Sin. A Sin without violation is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality.”
(p.1025 - This is John Galt speaking)
“You are asked to sacrifice your intellectual integrity, your logic, your reason, your standard of truth – in favor of becoming a prostitute whose standard is the greatest good for the greatest number.”
(p.1030 - This is John Galt speaking)
“…it is only the undeserved that calls for that moral transaction which consists of profit to one at the price of disaster to the other.”
(p.1032 - This is John Galt speaking)
“Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtue of another. ….To love those who are worthy of it is self-interest; to love the unworthy is sacrifice.”
(p.1034 - This is John Galt speaking)
“The mystics of both schools, who preach the creed of sacrifice, are germs that attack you through a single sore: your fear of relying on your mind.”
(p.1034 - This is John Galt speaking)
“An honest man does not desire until he has identified the object of his desire. He says: ‘It is, therefore I want it.’ They say: ‘I want it, therefore it is.’”
(p.1036 - This is John Galt speaking)
“Consciousness cannot be surrendered without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you deserve the consequences.”
(p.1044 - This is John Galt speaking)
“…the truth about their souls is worse than the obscure excuse you have allowed them, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice are means to nobler ends. The truth is that those horrors are their ends. …They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself.”
(p.1046 - This is John Galt speaking)
“I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality – and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was the impotent – that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real – and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it.”
(p.1048 - This is John Galt speaking)
“[Do not] honor a fortune-teller above a fortune-maker.”
(p.1052 - This is John Galt speaking)
“No man can survive the moment of pronouncing himself irredeemably evil; should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide.”
(p.1057 - This is John Galt speaking)
“An error made on your own is safer than ten truth accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error.”
(p.1058 - This is John Galt speaking)
“…there is no more despicable coward than the man who deserted the battle for his joy.”
(p.1059 - This is John Galt speaking)
“When you learn that pride is the sum of all virtue you will learn to live like a man. As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man’s demand for your help. To demand is to claim that your life is his property – and loathsome as such claim might be, there’s something still more loathsome: your agreement. Do you ask if it’s ever proper to help another man? No – if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes – if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle.”
(p.1060 - This is John Galt speaking)
“Drifters and physical laborers live and plan by the range of a day. The better the mind, the longer the range.”
(p.1063 - This is John Galt speaking)
“The man who produces an idea in any field of rational endeavor – the man who discovers new knowledge – is the permanent benefactor of humanity.”
(p.1064 - This is John Galt speaking)
copyright c Ayn Rand, 1957 ISBN 0-525-93418-9. extracted and compiled by Matias Masucci, 2008
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