Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged
KolektifQuotes
As Francisco says at the end of his speech about the meaning of money, “When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other—and your time is running out” (415).
Sayfa 24 - Onkar Ghate
I. The world is perishing from the morality of sacrifice, and the men of the mind are on strike against this morality, which is speeding up the process of destruction (1009–11).
II. The proper, rational morality for man is one of life and reason, based on the axiom that existence exists (1011–24).
III. The morality of sacrifice is the morality of death, for it demands renunciation of that which makes life possible: the mind—and thus of any enjoyment of life on earth (1024–34).
IV. This code is taught by men who, having renounced their minds, seek power over the consciousnesses of other men, by attempting to convince them to renounce their own minds and accept the morality of sacrifice; the deepest motive of these teachers of sacrifice is hatred of existence, of life, of man, of themselves—and their goal is to destroy their victims and themselves (1034–47).
V. If all men who desire to live reject—as we the strikers have—these doctrines of mysticism and sacrifice, realizing that no compromise is possible, and refuse to support their destroyers, demanding instead a society of rights and freedom, then the society of the mystics and looters will perish, and we will come to have a world of reason, freedom, achievement, and joy (1047–69).
Sayfa 384 - Allan Gotthelf, Galt's Speech in Five Sentences
Whoever you are—you who are alone with my words in this moment, with nothing but your honesty to help you understand—the choice is still open to be a human being, but the price is to start from scratch, to stand naked in the face of reality and, reversing a costly historical error, to declare: “I am, therefore I’ll think.” (1058)
I cherish the phrase “alone with my words in this moment, with nothing but your honesty to help you understand.” Every reader, every thinker, every human being is alone with the words, with nothing but his honesty to help him understand.
Sayfa 74
The course of each great cultural step forward runs like this: a genius makes a great discovery; he is fought, opposed, persecuted, ridiculed, denounced in every way possible; he is made a martyr—he has to pay for his discovery and for his greatness, pay in suffering, poverty, obscurity, insults, sometimes in actual arrest, jail, and death. Then
Sayfa 57
Justice was evil, you said? You called it cruel? No man in your world can now claim any value of spirit or matter as his right, he can only receive it as alms. Independence was evil, you said? You called it selfish? No man in your world can now act on his own, he can only submit to the wishes of others. Reason was evil, you said? You called it arrogant? No man in your world can now judge for himself, he can only have a faith in a higher authority. Wealth was evil, you said? You called it greed? No man in your world is now above the rank of pauper, holding no shred of property he can call his own. Self-esteem was evil, you said? You called it pride?
No man in your world now has cause to feel any emotion but shame. Happiness, you cried, was the most selfish of evils? There is no taint of it left to mar your world, not in any moment of man’s life nor in any corner of his soul. (74–75)
This paragraph is powerful. It is replaced by a single sentence of epigrammatic conciseness: “It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection”(1010).
Sayfa 71