Jeff Ragan’s Reviews > Atlas Shrugged > Status Update

"'The trouble with our modern world' Dr. Robert Stadler said... 'is that too many people think too much. It is the cause of all our current fears...An enlightened citizenry should abandon the superstitious worship of logic & the outmoded reliance on reason. Just as laymen leave medicine to doctors & electronics to engineers, so people who are not qualified to think should leave all thinking to the experts..." (859).

"There was a time, she thought, when [Reardon's] mind, his energy, his inexhaustible resourcefulness had been given to the task of a producer devising better ways to deal with nature; now, they were switched to the task of a criminal outwitting men. She wondered how long a man could endure a change of that kind" (844).

"There, she thought, was the ultimate goal of all that loose academic prattle which businessmen had ignored for years, the goal of all the slipshod definitions, the sloppy generalities, the soupy abstractions all claiming that obedience to objective reality is the same as the obedience to the State, that there is no difference between a law of nature and a bureaucrat's directive..." (838-9).

"Sure! I was there with a woman! That's what I did because that's what I felt like doing! Do you think you're going to scare me with your gasps, your stares, your whimpering virtue?...Take it and like it!...I'm sick of having to put on an act for your righteous satisfaction!...I'll do as I please, and you'll keep your mouth shut and go through the right tricks in public like everybody else..." (825).

"It's true. Some people do want to destroy it. And when you learn to understand their motive, you'll know the darkest, ugliest and only evil in the world, but you'll be safely out of its reach" (816).

"You want it to be unearned...that's what all of you really want - not money, not material benefits, not economic security, not any of the handouts you keep demanding...All of you welfare preachers - it's not unearned money that you're after. You want handouts, but of a different kind...it's the spirit that you want to loot...You want to be a man like Hank Rearden without the necessity of being what he is" (810).

"...local railroad had gone bankrupt...abandoning the region to the fate of a blighted area, the local banker had committed suicide, first killing his wife & children - a freight train had been taken off the schedule in Tennessee, leaving a local factory without transportation at a day's notice...that he, James Taggart, might sit in a private barroom & pay for the alcohol pouring down Orren Boyle's throat...(793-4).

"It was not their own convictions of sin & dishonor that they could use to disgrace you - it was mine. They merely carried out the things I believed...It was I who kept our love hidden as a guilty secret - they merely treated it for what it was by my own appraisal. It was I who was willing to counterfeit reality for the sake of appearance in their eyes - they merely cashed in on the right I had given them" (787).

"Dagny noticed the first flicker of feeling in Lillian's lifeless eyes: it resembled pleasure, but so distantly that it looked like sunlight reflected from the dead surface of the moon to the stagnant water of a swamp; it flickered for an instant and went" (778).

"Everybody knows how...schedules have been run in the past three weeks, & why some districts...get transportation, while others don't. What we're not supposed to do is say that we know it. We're supposed to pretend to believe that 'public welfare' is the only reason for any decision - & that the public welfare of the city of New York requires the immediate delivery of a large quantity of grapefruit" (767-8).