“He didn’t invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?”
“Who?”
“Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention. Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”
She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
"Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy - a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real… Happiness is possible only to a rational man…"
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Just ordered this - it and a bunch of other shirts from Out of Print are on sale at Fab.com right now.
"Love is our response to our highest values — and can be nothing else."
Francisco d’Anconia, Atlas Shrugged (via dagnyrearden)
"He held the length of her body pressed to his, as if their bodies were two currents rising upward together, each to a single point, each carrying the whole of their consciousness to the meeting of their lips."
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (via thoughtsfromsirius)
(via dagnyrearden)
(Source: maskandmachete, via dagnyrearden)
“He didn’t invent iron ore and blast furnaces, did he?”
“Who?”
“Rearden. He didn’t invent smelting and chemistry and air compression. He couldn’t have invented his Metal but for thousands and thousands of other people. His Metal! Why does he think it’s his? Why does he think it’s his invention? Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything.”
She said, puzzled, “But the iron ore and all those other things were there all the time. Why didn’t anybody else make that Metal, but Mr. Rearden did?”
From Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
(I borrowed this from the Cato Institute’s Facebook page.)
This is me being against the Supreme Court allowing congress to force people to buy anything under the guise of a ‘tax.’ Last I checked, the American revolution happened because an un-elected individual forced taxes on its colonists…. Sound familiar? The president said countless times that his healthcare was not a tax. But now the Supreme Court says it is. And not only that, that it’s constitutional.
What will they force us to buy next? Carbon credits - because the environment needs our help? Birth control - so that the government isn’t burdened by the cost of mothers who can’t afford their children? Newspaper subscriptions - because we all need to be informed individuals? Vitamins — because we need to be healthy? If you haven’t thought about this, I think it’s very important to do so.I can’t even. I feel like I’m living in Atlas Shrugged right now. That’s not a good thing.
"A special session of the legislature of the People’s State of Chile had been called for ten o’clock this morning, to pass an act of utmost importance to the people of Chile, Argentina and other South American People’s States. In line with the enlightened policy of Señor Ramirez, the new Head of the Chilean State - who came to power on the moral slogan that man is his brother’s keeper - the legislature was to nationalize the Chilean properties of d’Anconia Copper, thus opening the way for the People’s State of Argentina to nationalize the rest of the d’Anconia properties the world over. This, however, was known only to a very few of the top-level leaders of both nations. The measure had been kept secret in order to avoid debate and reactionary opposition. The seizure of the multi-billion dollar d’Anconia Copper was to come as a munificent surprise to the country.
On the stroke of ten, in the exact moment when the chairman’s gavel struck the rostrum, opening the session - almost as if the gavel’s blow had set it off - the sound of a tremendous explosion rocked the hall, shattering the glass of its windows. It came from the harbor, a few streets away - and when the legislators rushed to the windows, they saw a long column of flame where once there had risen the familiar silhouettes of the ore docks of d’Anconia Copper. The ore docks had been blown to bits."
Chapter V Part III
Atlas Shrugged
Ayn Rand
(via shecallsmeartemis)
(Source: spilloverfrommyotherblog, via shecallsmeartemis-deactivated20)
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?” said Dr. Ferris.
“We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against—then you’ll know that this is not the age of beautiful gestures. We’re after power and we mean it. Your fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you’d better get wise to it. There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power the government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking a law."
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (via foundmoment)
(via benevolentoverlord)
I wish this would have been revealed during her lifetime, so that she would have been forced to write a 1200 page long book about how hypocrisy is the trait of a strong virtuous individual.
“The same moral principles and considerations apply to the issue of accepting social security, unemployment insurance, or other payments of that kind. It is obvious, in such cases, that a man receives his own money which was taken from him by force, directly and specifically, without his consent, against his own choice. Those who advocated such laws are morally guilty, since they assumed the “right” to force employers and unwilling co-workers. But the victims, who opposed such laws, have a clear right to any refund of their own money—and they would not advance the cause of freedom if they left their money, unclaimed, for the benefit of the welfare-state administration.”
-Ayn Rand, 1966
^
(via 32830)
"Destruction is the only end that the mystics’ creed has ever achieved, as it is the only end that you see them achieving today, and if the ravages wrought by their acts have not made them question their doctrines, if they profess to be moved by love, yet are not deterred by piles of human corpses, it is because the truth about their souls is worse than the obscene excuse you have allowed them, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice are means to nobler ends. The truth is that those horrors are their ends."
from John Galt’s speech in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (p. 957-958)
"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."
John Galt - Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand (via bingethinker92)
(Source: binge-thinker, via 32830)
- Dagny Taggart: I'm not interested in their opinion.
- James Taggart: Then whose do you go by?
- Dagny: My own.
"
“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders-what would you tell him to do?”
“I … don’t know. What … could he do? What would you tell him?”
“To shrug.”
"Atlas Shrugged (via oddvagabond)
(via 32830)
