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?"

When he preaches contradictions, he does so in the knowledge that someone will accept the burden of the impossible, someone will make it work for him at the price of his own suffering or life; destruction is the price of any contradiction.

This was Mulligan’s concept of wealth, she thought—the wealth of selection, not of accumulation.

He pressed the starter, the motor’s explosion blasted the story contained in the silence, and they drove on.

She had caught the sound of suffering in the faintest exaggeration of evenness in his voice.

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.