Jeff Ragan’s Reviews > Atlas Shrugged > Status Update

"The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake & eat it, too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it. But if you drown both laws in the blanks of your mind...then you can try to proclaim your right to eat your cake today & mine tomorrow, you can preach that the way to have a cake is to eat it first, before you bake it, that the way to produce is...by consuming" (950).

"And that is precisely the goal of your morality, the duty that your code demands of you. Give to that which you do not enjoy, serve that which you do not admire, submit to that which you consider evil - surrender the world to the values of others, deny, reject, renounce your self. Your self is your mind; renounce it and you become a chunk of meat ready for any cannibal to swallow" (942-3).

"...to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor & sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay - that your work is the process of achieving your values, & to lose your ambition for values is to lose you ambition to live...that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch...(933-4).

"Rumors went spreading through the county in whispers of cynical terror - yet people read the newspapers and acted as if they believed what they read, each competing with the others on who would keep most blindly silent, each pretending that he did not know what he knew, each striving to believe that the unnamed was the unreal" (918).

"It was the silence of immobility within him, as if possessing knowledge, he could now afford to rest with no further activity of soul. He felt nothing, neither anguish nor elation. It was as if, by an effort of years, he had climbed a mountain to gain a distant view and, having reached the top, had fallen to lie still, to rest before he looked, free to spare himself for the first time" (904).

"She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if - he thought with a shudder - as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it..." (892).

"...they had known that in reason, in justice, in self-preservation, his only course was to drop it all and run - yet they wanted to hold him, to keep him in the sacrificial furnace, to make him let them devour the last of him in the name of mercy, forgiveness and brother-cannibal love" (891).

"Dagny, it's not that I don't suffer, it's that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one's soul and as a permanent scar across one's view of existence" (878).

"Some crudely childish form of self-deception had made them choose to give to this occasion the decorous setting of a formal dinner. They acted as if they hoped to gain, from the objects of gracious luxury, the power and the honor of which those objects had once been the product and symbol..." (865).

"'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).