atlas-shrugged

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

...he had acquired the conviction that one had to concern oneself with the rational, not the insane__hat one had to seek that which was right, because the right answer always won__hat the senseless, the wrong, the monstrously unjust could not work, could not succeed, could do nothing but defeat itself.

...he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.

He saw for the first time that he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.

He saw the article...which was not an expression of ideas, but a bucket of slime emptied in public__n article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a stream of sneers and adjectives in which nothing was clear except the filthy malice of denouncing without considering proof necessary.

...she stood beside him, sagging in his arms, abandoning herself to anything he wished, in open acknowledgment of his power to reduce her to helplessness by the pleasure he had the power to give her.

As she looked at him, her dark gray eyes went slowly from astonishment to stillness, then to a strange expression that resembled a look of weariness, except that it seemed to reflect much more than the endurance of this one moment.

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.

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

You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.

Thought__e told himself quietly__s 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__ 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.

They say that it__ hard for men to agree. You__ be surprised how easy it is__hen 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.

The things you were talking about. The lights and the flowers. Do they expect those things to make them romantic, not the other way around?___arling, what do you mean?___here wasn__ a person there who enjoyed it,_ she said, her voice lifeless, __r who thought or felt anything at all. They moved about, and they said the same dull things they say anywhere. I suppose they thought the lights would make it brilliant.___arling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay.___ow? By being stupid?

No action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice.

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.

There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit__nd if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

No, justice has not ceased to exist. How could it? It is possible for men to abandon their sight of it, and then it is justice that destroys them. But it is not possible for justice to go out of existence, because one is an attribute of the other, because justice is the act of acknowledging that which exists.

...there__ nothing of any importance in life__xcept how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It__ the only measure of human value.