Her face looked as if she knew his worst suffering and it was hers and she wished to bear it like this, coldly, asking no words of mitigation.
No. Forget it. You’re only fooling yourself.” “About what?” “About anything being worth a damn. It’s dust, lady, all of it, dust and blood.
Nobody stays in this valley except by a full, conscious choice based on a full, conscious knowledge of every fact involved in his decision. Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.
He was usually disliked, from the first sight of his face, anywhere he went. His face was closed like the door of a safety vault; things locked in safety vaults are valuable; men did not care to feel that.
It was a hymn with the force of a march, a march with the majesty of a hymn. It was a song of soldiers bearing sacred banners and of priests carrying swords. It was an anthem to the sanctity of strength.
It has been a day of wonder, this, our first day in the forest.
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 own destruction. 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.
The truth or falsehood of all of man’s conclusions, inferences, thought and knowledge rests on the truth or falsehood of his definitions.
As to the role of emotions in art and the subconscious mechanism that serves as the integrating factor both in artistic creation and in man’s response to art, they involve a psychological phenomenon which we call a sense of life. A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence.
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.
Other people are human. They’re sensitive. They can’t devote their whole life to metals and engines. You’re lucky- you’ve never had any feelings. You’ve never felt anything at all.
By the essence and nature of existence, contradictions cannot exist. If you find it inconceivable that an invention of genius should be abandoned among ruins, and that a philosopher should wish to work as a cook in a diner -check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
An inventor is a man who asks ‘Why?
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? Why don’t you uphold your own code of values among men as you do among iron smelters? You who won’t allow one per cent of impurity into an alloy of metal – what have you allowed into your moral code?
Do you always have to have a purpose? Do you always have to be so damn serious? Can’t you ever do things without reason, just like everybody else? You’re so serious, so old. Everything’s important with you, everything’s great, significant in some way, every minute, even when you keep still. Can’t you ever be comfortable – and unimportant?
What glory can there be in the conquest of a mindless body?
There, he thought, was the final abortion of the creed of collective interdependence, the creed of non-identity, non-property, non-fact: the belief that the moral stature of one is at the mercy of the action of another.
The giants of the intellect, whom you admire so much, once taught you that the earth was flat and that the atom was the smallest particle of matter. The entire history of science is a progression of exploded fallacies, not of achievements.
The Romanticists did not present a hero as a statistical average, but as an abstraction of man’s best and highest potentiality, applicable to and achievable by all men, in various degrees, according to their individual choices.
The justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil.