Atlas Shrugged Visions of America

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 too powerful to have no purpose. The passengers watched them idly without interest. [...] An office building appeared, close to the tracks. The big neon sign on its roof lighted the interiors of the coaches as they went by. It said: Rearden Steel. (1.2.1.1-7)

She walked on. She stopped at the window of a bookstore. The window displayed a pyramid of slabs in brownish-purple jackets, inscribed: The Vulture if Molting. "The novel of our century," said a placard. "The penetrating study of a businessman's greed. A fearless revelation of man's depravity." (1.4.1.30)

The car jerked forward. It moved slowly through a gap in a plank barrier, past the hole of a broken water main. She saw the new pipe stacked by the excavation; the pipe bore a trademark: Stockton Foundry, Colorado. She looked away; she wished she were not reminded of Colorado. (1.7.2.16)

The sky had deepened to the greenish-blue of the rails, when they saw smokestacks in a distant valley. It was one of Colorado's new towns, the towns that had grown like a radiation from the Wyatt oil fields. She saw the angular lines of modern houses, flat roofs, great sheets of windows. ...a rocket shot out form among the buildings, rose high above the town and broke as a fountain of gold stars against the darkening sky. Men whom she could not see, were seeing the streak of the train on the side of a mountain and were sending a salute, a lonely plume of fire in the dusk, the symbol of celebration or of a call for help. (1.8.7.48)

"Why didn't you move?"

"Where to?"

"Anywhere."

"What for?"

Dagny was staring at the two buckets; they were square tins with rope handles; they had been oil cans. (1.9.6.75-79)

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money – and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement....[T]here appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being – the self-made man – the American industrialist." (2.2.4.39)

Nathaniel Taggart had been a penniless adventurer who had come from somewhere in New England and built a railroad across a continent, in the days of the first steel rails. His railroad still stood; his battle to build it had dissolved into a legend. (1.3.2.14)

"You know, Dagny, Thanksgiving was a holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work." (2.2.4.199)

The first story of the Minnesota disaster appeared in the newspapers three days later. It reported that the farmers who had waited in the streets of Lakewood for six days, with no place to store their wheat and no trains to carry it, had demolished the local courthouse, the mayor's home and the railroad station. Then the stories vanished abruptly and the newspapers kept silent, then began to print admonitions urging people not to believe unpatriotic rumors. (3.5.3.33)

"From its start, this country was a threat to the ancient rule of mystics. In the brilliant, rocket-explosion of its youth, this country displayed to an incredulous world what greatness was possible to man, what happiness was possible on earth. It was one or the other: America or mystics." (3.7.1.372)

"Do you know that the United States is the only country in history that has ever used its own monogram [the dollar sign] as a symbol of its depravity?... It was the only country in history...whose money was the symbol of man's right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself." (2.10.2.179)