Atlas Shrugged: my highlights

I've picked up 'Atlas Shrugged' again (by Ayn Rand) after putting it down over a year ago. I was 700 pages in, covering the first two volumes. I have only the last part to finish - around 450 pages to go. As I do, a habit has formed where I highlight the bits that stand out to me. There are so many statements pushing Rand's philosophy, I'd simply suggest for everyone to read it!

For my own benefit, I'm putting some quotes up here so I don't forget the impact this book has on me. Although I'm not done with it, I sense the importance of every chapter, every event and turn within this book. It is a complete and easily understood guide to objectivism and living rationally and for one's self. It is a direct attack on altruism and identifies the state society can slide into if it blindly follows big government and a command economy.

The size of the book may push many away, but I guarantee how life changing this book can be to the willing. Let it guide you, for the wisdom this book may present can set you free.

Anyway, as I read through and pick stuff out, I'll feed them into my blog.

The oath to 'Galt's Gulch'

“I swear - by my life and my love of it - that I shall never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine"

Francisco d’Anconia speaking to Dagny Taggart (P. 740)

“But we—we, who must atone for the guilt of ability—we will work to support him as he orders, with his pleasure as our only reward. Since we have the most to contribute, we will have the least to say. Since we have the better capacity to think, we will not be permitted a thought of our own. Since we have the judgment to act, we will not be permitted an action of our choice. We will work under directives and controls, issued by those who are incapable of working. They will dispose of our energy, because they have none to offer, and of our product, because they can’t produce. Do you say that this is impossible, that it cannot be made to work? They know it, but it is you who don’t—and they are counting on you not to know it. They are counting on you to go on, to work to the limit of the inhuman and to feed them while you last—and when you collapse, there will be another victim starting out and feeding them, while struggling to survive—and the span of each succeeding victim will be shorter, and while you’ll die to leave them a railroad, your last descendant-in-spirit will die to leave them a loaf of bread. This does not worry the looters of the moment. Their plan—like all the plans of all the royal looters of the past—is only that the loot shall last their lifetime. It has always lasted before, because in one generation they could not run out of victims. But this time—it will not last. The victims are on strike. We are on strike against martyrdom—and against the moral code that demands it. We are on strike against those who believe that one man must exist for the sake of another. We are on strike against the morality of cannibals, be it practiced in body or in spirit. We will not deal with men on any terms but ours—and our terms are a moral code which holds that man is an end in himself and not the means to any end of others. We do not seek to force our code upon them. They are free to believe what they please. But, for once, they will have to believe it and to exist—without our help. And, once and for all, they will learn the meaning of their creed. That creed has lasted for centuries solely by the sanction of the victims—by means of the victims’ acceptance of punishment for breaking a code impossible to practice. But that code was intended to be broken. It is a code that thrives not on those who observe it, but on those who don’t, a morality kept in existence not by virtue of its sins, but by the grace of its sinners. We have decided not to be sinners any longer. We have ceased breaking that moral code. We shall blast it out of existence forever by the one method that it can’t withstand: by obeying it.”

Francisco d’Anconia speaking to Dagny Taggart (P. 768)

“Of course. Don’t you understand it now? Dagny, every form of happiness is one, every desire is driven by the same motor – by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of our own existence – and every achievement is an expression of it. Look around you. Do you see how much is open to us here, on an unobstructed earth? Do you see how much I am free to do, to experience, to achieve? Do you see that all of it is part of what you are to me – as I am part of it for you? And if I’ll see you smile with admiration at a new copper smelter that I built, it will be another form of what I felt when I lay in bed beside you. Will I want to sleep with you? Desperately. Will I envy the man who does? Sure. But what does that matter? It’s so much – just to have you here, to love you and to be alive.”