Atlas Shrugged

"What is morality?" she asked.

"Judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. But where does one find it?"

There was one sleepy attendant at the airfield, young, pudgy and, but for a faint smell of college about his vocabulary, a brain brother of the night dispatcher of Bradshaw.

The demanding resentment was breaking loose, in small, crackling puffs, like chestnuts popping open in the dark oven of the minds who now felt certain that they were taken care of and safe.

There they were, she thought, the men of the new age, the demanders and recipients of self-sacrifice.

Only I think that it’s a sin to sit down and let your life go, without making a try for it.”

The train was now diving into the prairies of Nebraska, the rattle of its couplers sounding as if it were shivering with cold.

The twilight was draining the sky without the wound of a sunset; it looked more like the fading of an anemic body in the process of exhausting its last drops of blood and light.

When they were gone, he felt what one feels at the loss of a dream one had not known till after it was lost.

She felt a great sense of peace between them, and the intimacy of the unimportant gestures underscored the importance of the things they were not saying to each other.

We are the soul, of which railroads, copper mines, steel mills and oil wells are the body—and they are living entities that beat day and night, like our hearts, in the sacred function of supporting human life, but only so long as they remain our body, only so long as they remain the expression, the reward and the property of achievement.