atlas-shrugged

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it__hat no substitute can do your thinking__hat the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

No, you do not have to live as a man; it is an act of moral choice. But you cannot live as anything else__nd the alternative is that state of living death which you now see within you and around you, the state of a thing unfit for existence, no longer human and less than animal, a thing that knows nothing but pain and drags itself through its span of years in the agony of unthinking self-destruction.

It was the smile of a man who is able to see, to know and to create the glory of existence. It was the mocking, challenging smile of a brilliant intelligence.

I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.

Do you know what she did today?" He leaned confidentially across the table, pointing at the dishes in the sink. "She went to the market and left all the breakfast dishes there and said she'd do them later. I know what she wanted. She expected me to do them. Well, I'll fool her. I'll leave them just where they are.

Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes,thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of my life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?""I've felt it all my life," she said.

You always play it open, don__ you?_ he asked.____e never noticed you doing otherwise.___ thought I was the only one who could afford to.

The capacity for unclouded enjoyment, she thought, does not belong to irresponsible fools; an inviolate peace of spirit is not the achievement of a drifter; to be able to laugh like that is the end result of the most profound, most solemn thinking.

Well, whose opinion did you take?___ don__ ask for opinions.___hat do you go by?___udgment.___ell, whose judgment did you take?___ine.___ut whom did you consult about it?___obody.

He knew that the dread in these men__ minds was not of the fact, but of his naming it__s if the fact had not existed, but his words held the power to make it exist.

Don__ tell me your evaluation. Give me the facts.

Nothing can justify injustice.

...dangers, to Francisco, were merely opportunities for another brilliant performance; there were no battles he could lose, no enemies to beat him.

She wanted to tell him of the years she had spent looking for men such as he to work with; she wanted to tell him that his enemies were hers, that she was fighting the same battle...

It was the only lie she ever told. She did not do it to protect Francisco; she did it because she felt, for some reason which she could not define, that the incident was a secret too precious to share.

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.

Are you saying,_ he asked slowly, __hat I rose in your estimation when you found that I wanted you?___f course.___hat__ not the reaction of most people to being wanted.___t isn__.___ost people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.___ feel that others live up to me, if they want me....

Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically.