Only when you can feel contempt for your own priceless little ego, only then can you achieve the true, broad peace of selflessness, the merging of your spirit with the vast collective spirit of mankind. There is no room for the love of others within the tight, crowded miser’s hole of a private ego.
She fought like an animal. But she made no sound. She did not call for help. She heard the echoes of her blows in a gasp of his breath, and she knew that it was a gasp of pleasure.
For five days and nights, she had fought a single desire – to go to him. To see him alone – anywhere – his home or his office or the street – for one word or only one glance – but alone.
He knew that the dread in these men’s minds was not of the fact, but of his naming it – as if the fact had not existed, but his words held the power to make it exist.
We waste our energy fighting one another, instead of presenting a common front to the world.
The man in Drawing Room B, Car No. 4, was a newspaper publisher who believed that men are evil by nature and unfit for freedom, that their basic interests, if left unchecked, are to lie, to rob and to murder one another – and, therefore, men must be ruled by means of lies, robbery and murder, which must be made the exclusive privilege of the rulers, for the purpose of forcing men to work, teaching them to be moral and keeping them within the bounds of order and justice.
She did not listen to the voices of the men behind her. She did not know for how long the broken snatches of their struggle kept rolling past her – the sounds that nudged and prodded one another, trying to edge back and leave someone pushed forward – a struggle, not to assert one’s own will, but to squeeze an assertion from some unwilling victim – a battle in which the decision was to be pronounced, not by the winner, but by the loser.
It seemed natural; natural to the moment’s peculiar reality that was sharply clear, but cut off from everything, immediate, but disconnected, like a bright island in a wall of fog, the heightened, unquestioning reality one feels when one is drunk.
In the crowded tension of the days that followed he never spoke to them, except of their work. They felt, entering the office in the morning, that they had no private lives, no significance and no reality save the overwhelming reality of the broad sheets of paper on their tables. The place seemed cold and soulless like a factory, until they looked at him; then they thought that it was not a factory, but a furnace fed on their bodies, his own first.
In his profession and mine you’re successful if it leaves you untouched.” “How does one achieve that?” “In one of two ways: by not looking at people at all or by looking at everything about them.” “Which is preferable, Miss Francon?” “Whichever is hardest.” “But a desire to choose the hardest might be a confession of weakness in itself.
There were no traces of human existence around them. Old ruts, overgrown with grass, made human presence seem more distant, adding the distance of years to the distance of miles. A haze of twilight remained over the ground, but in the breaks between the tree trunks there were leaves that hung in patches of shining green and seemed to light the forest. The leaves hung still. They walked, alone to move through a motionless world. She noticed suddenly that they had not said a word for a long time.
It was as if a volcano were cracking open, yet the people at the foot of the mountain ignored the sudden fissures, the black fumes, the boiling trickles, and went on believing that their only danger was to acknowledge the reality of these signs.
You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they’re not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict – and they call it growth. At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been any entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held.
The field of extrospection is based on two cardinal questions: “What do I know?” and “How do I know it?” In the field of introspection, the two guiding questions are: “What do I feel?” and “Why do I feel it?” Most.
Reason functions by integrating perceptual data into concepts.
People who are afraid to sacrifice somebody have no business talking about a common purpose.
When one enters any intellectual battle, big or small, public or private, one cannot seek, desire or expect the enemy’s sanction. Truth or falsehood must be one’s sole concern and sole criterion of judgment – not anyone’s approval or disapproval; and, above all, not the approval of those whose standards are the opposite of one’s own.
Let those who are actually concerned with peace observe that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace in history – a period during which there were no wars involving the entire civilized world – from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
Tension seemed natural to her, not a sign of anxiety, but a sign of enjoyment...
Dagny listened to the Fourth Concerto, her head thrown back, her eyes closed. She lay half-stretched across the corner of a couch, her body relaxed and still; but tension stressed the shape of her mouth on her motionless face, a sensual shape drawn in lines of longing.