atlas-shrugged

The man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises__ecause she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him.

No matter what corruption he__ taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment__ust try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity?-an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value.

Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself.

It seemed natural; natural to the moment__ 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.

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.

There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another__f men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn__.

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

Señor d.__nconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?___ust exactly what it deserves.___h, how cruel!___on__ you believe in the operation of the moral law, madame?_ Francisco asked gravely. __ do.

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.

Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence__y his own choice.

If that__ the price of getting together, then I__l be damned if I want to live on the same earth with any human beings! If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? Nothing can make self-immolation proper. Nothing can give them the right to turn men into sacrificial animals. Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can__ be punished for being good. One can__ be penalized for ability. If that is right, then we__ better start slaughtering one another, because there isn__ any right at all in the world!

Reason is your means of survival _ so that for you, who are a human being, the question __o be or not to be_ is the question 'to think or not to think..'.

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.

Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires...Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform.

To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call __uman nature,_ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct.

By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man__very man__s an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.

Man__ life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose . If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man__or the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.

Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies...It is only the concept of __ife_ that makes the concept of 'Value_ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.