Atlas Shrugged Quotes

"Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exit unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another...

"Every man builds his world in his own image," he said. "He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and t...

She was speaking with a swift, bright certainty, conscious of nothing but the joy of performing her natural function in her natural world where nothing could take precedence over the act of offerin...

"What do you care which records? Richard Halley. She loves the music of Richard Halley. Outside the railroad, that's the only thing she loves." (1.3.3.7)

They kept their secret from the knowledge of others, not as a shameful guilt, but as a thing that was immaculately theirs, beyond anyone's right of debate or appraisal. She knew the general doctrin...

Motive power – thought Dagny, looking up at the Taggart Building in the twilight – was its first need; motive power, to keep that building standing; movement, to keep it immovable. (1.4...

Sitting as a helpless spectator, a minority member, at one of the Board meetings, she felt a strange evasiveness in the air of the room, in every speech, in every argument, as if the real reason of...

Eddie Willers looked away. He had never liked the sight of that calendar. It disturbed him, in a manner he could not explain or define. The feeling seemed to blend in with his sense of uneasiness;...

He wanted no sadness attached to his childhood; he loved its memories; any day of it he remembered now seemed flooded by a still, brilliant sunlight. It seemed to him as if a few rays reached into...

It began with a few lights. As a train of the Taggart line rolled toward Philadelphia, a few brilliant, scattered lights appeared in the darkness; they seemed purposeless in the empty plain, but to...

She felt, at the same time, a growing respect for the adversary, for a science that was so clean, so strict, so luminously rational. Studying mathematics, she felt, quite simply and at once, "How g...