atlas-shrugged

Indifference to me, is the epitome of all evil.

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.

What__ wealth but the means of expanding one__ life? There__ two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster.

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.

The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it.

Isn__ it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure?_ he said to her once, quite simply. They were happy and radiantly innocent. They were both incapable of the conception that joy is sin.

What glory can there be in the conquest of a mindless body?

Sex is the physical expression of a tribute to personal values.

Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives__nd observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy.

The man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures __hich can__ be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man__ sense of his own value.

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.

She knew the general doctrine on sex, held by people in one form or another, the doctrine that sex was an ugly weakness of man__ lower nature, to be condoned regretfully. She experienced an emotion of chastity that made her shrink, not from the desires of her body, but from any contact with the minds who held this doctrine.