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.
They seemed to want her approval, without having to know whether she approved or not.
I will have no claim to make except that I need you so much. And that I love you. I told you once not to consider it. Now I’ll use it as a tin cup.
No matter how hard a struggle he had lived through in the past, he had never reached the ultimate ugliness of abandoning the will to act. In moments of suffering, he had never let pain win its one permanent victory: he had never allowed it to make him lose the desire for joy. He had never doubted the nature of the world or man’s greatness as its motive power and its core.
In learning, we draw an abstraction from concrete objects and events. In creating, we make our own concrete objects and events out of the abstraction; we bring the abstraction down and back to its specific meaning, to the concrete; but the abstraction has helped us to make the kind of concrete we want the concrete to be. It has helped us to create – to reshape the world as we wish it to be for our purposes.
There is no such thing as ‘the public interest’ except as the sum of the interests of individual men. And the basic, common interest of all men – all rational men – is freedom. Freedom is the first requirement of ‘the public interest’ – not what men do when they are free, but that they are free. All their achievements rest on that foundation – and cannot exist without it.
Many errors and tragic disillusionments are possible in this process of emotional recognition, since a sense of life, by itself, is not a reliable cognitive guide. And if there are degrees of evil, then one of the most evil consequences of mysticism – in terms of human suffering – is the belief that love is a matter of “the heart,” not the mind, that love is an emotion independent of reason, that love is blind and impervious to the power of philosophy.
Man’s motive power is his moral code.
Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?
There’s a particular kind of people I despise. Those who seek some higher purpose or ‘universal goal’, those who do not know what to live for, who moan that they ‘must find themselves.’ You hear it all around us. That seems to be the official bromide of our century. Every book you open. Every drooling self-confession. It seems to be the noble thing to confess. I think it would be the most shameful one.
Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature,” said Balph Eubank contemptuously.
She lay on her back, looking up at the sky, feeling no desire to move or think or know that there was any time beyond this 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.
A code that forbids you to cast the first stone, has forbidden you to admit the identity of stones and to know when or if you’re being stoned.
Neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of irrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in any random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature requires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless fraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless he seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
What Columbus felt when he landed in America, what the astronauts felt when they landed on the moon, is what a child feels when he discovers the earth, between the ages of two and seven.
Roark, floating like a piece of driftwood, held a power greater than that of the engine in the belly of the yacht. Wynand thought: Because that is the power from which the engine has come.
The indignation was too sharp and raw for a mere piece of professional gossip; each man took it as a personal insult; each felt himself qualified to alter, advise and improve the work of any man living.
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 who lives up to his own standards. Save us from the man of clean coscience. He’s the man who’ll beat us.
She had driven far down the winding road, and the lights of the diner were long since out of sight, when she noticed that she was enjoying the taste of the cigarette he had given her: it was different from any she had ever smoked before. She held the small remnant to the light of the dashboard, looking for the name of the brand. There was no name, only a trademark. Stamped in gold on the thin, white paper there stood the sign of the dollar.