Jeff Ragan’s Reviews > Atlas Shrugged > Status Update

"...the rebirth of d'Anconia Copper - and of the world - has to start here, in the United States. This country was the only country in history born, not of chance and blind tribal warfare, but as a rational product of man's mind. This country was built on the supremacy of reason - and, for one magnificent century, it redeemed the world. It will have to do so again" (707).

"I'm doing just what he is doing-only in my own way. He is withdrawing man's spirit from the looters, I'm withdrawing the products of man's spirit. He is depriving them of reason, I'm depriving them of wealth. He is draining the soul of the world, I'm draining its body. His is the lesson they have to learn...& I'm hastening their scholastic progress...I'm simply complying with their moral code..." (694).

"'I quit,' said Quentin Daniels 'because, if there are degrees of damnation, the scientist who places his mind in the service of brute force is the longest-range murderer on earth'" (683).

"All work is an act of philosophy. And when men will learn to consider productive work - and that which is its source - as the standard of their moral values,t hey will reach that state of perfection which is the birthright they lost...The source of work? Man's mind, Miss Taggart, man's reasoning mind" (677).

"But she knew that there was no meaning in motors or factories or trains, that their only meaning was in man's enjoyment of his life, which they served...for the power and the radiant vision within him which had seen the earth as a place of enjoyment and had known that the work of achieving one's happiness was the purpose, the sanction and the meaning of life" (670).

"Here, we trade achievements, not failures - values, not needs. We're free of one another, yet we all grow together. Wealth, Dagny? What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish" (663).

"...it was new to feel protected, and to feel that it was right to accept the protection, to surrender - right, because this peculiar sense of safety was not protection against the future, but against the past, not the protection of being spared from battle, but of having won it, not a protection granted to her weakness, but to her strength..." (645).

"Flung from side to side, like a battered pendulum, clinging to the wheel, half in her seat, half on her knees, she fought to pull the ship into a glide, for an attempt to make a belly-landing, while the green ground was whirling about her...And in answer to the earth that flew to meet her, she heard in her mind...the words of the sentence she hated...'Oh hell! Who is John Galt?'" (640).

"'I know that this stands for something.' 'The dollar sign? For a great deal. It stands on the vest of every fat, piglike figure in every cartoon, for the purpose of denoting a crook, a grafter, a scoundrel - as the one sure-fire brand of evil. It stands - as the money of a free country - for achievement, for success, for ability, for man's creative power...It stands for the initials of the United States'" (628).

"If men fall for some vicious piece of insanity, when they have no way to make it work and no possible reason to explain their choice - it's because they have a reason that they do not wish to tell" (614).