hank-rearden

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

She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth.

It was his self-esteem she had sought to destroy, knowing that a man who surrenders his value is at the mercy of anyone__ will; it was his moral purity she had struggled to breach, it was his confident rectitude she had wanted to shatter by means of the poison of guilt__s if, were he to collapse, his depravity would give her a right to hers.

If, to him, love was a celebration of one__ self and of existence__hen, to the self-haters and life-haters, the pursuit of destruction was the only form and equivalent of love.

Dagny leaned back in her chair. The short sentence was a shock. It was not merely relief: it was the sudden realization that nothing else was necessary to guarantee that it would be done; she needed no proofs, no questions, no explanations; a complex problem could rest safely on three syllables pronounced by a man who knew what he was saying.

He did not know that he was expected to attempt to buy his way into society and that they anticipated the pleasure of rejecting him. He had no time to notice their disappointment.

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

Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment__ torture.

We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts, and reality to values.

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

Such was the code that the world had accepted and such was the key to the code: that it hooked man__ love of existence to a circuit of torture, so that only the man who had nothing to offer would have nothing to fear, so that the virtues which made life possible and the values which gave it meaning became the agents of its destruction, so that one__ best became the tool of one__ agony, and man__ life on earth became impractical.

Man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child__ education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.

You always play it open, don__ you?_ he asked.____e never noticed you doing otherwise.___ thought I was the only one who could afford to.

Don__ tell me your evaluation. Give me the facts.

Nothing can justify injustice.

Are you saying,_ he asked slowly, __hat I rose in your estimation when you found that I wanted you?___f course.___hat__ not the reaction of most people to being wanted.___t isn__.___ost people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.___ feel that others live up to me, if they want me....

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

...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.