Цитаты из книги Atlas Shrugged

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his /man's/ Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge - he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil - he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor - he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire - he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy - all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was - that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love - he was not man.

«Потому что я не переношу тех, кто попусту растрачивает свои способности! Он медленно и многозначительно произнес: — И я тоже. То, как он произнес эти слова, затронуло в ее душе какую-то струну, отозвавшуюся в них обоих глубоким общим чувством; это сломало в ней ту сдержанность, которая всегда мешала ей просить о помощи. — Меня тошнит от них! — Ее испугал собственный голос, это был непроизвольно вырвавшийся крик души. — Я так изголодалась по людям, которые способны созидать, чем бы они ни занимались!»

The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer - because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut [...] He does not seek to gain his value, he seeks to express it. There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the desires of his body. But the man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises - because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him.

My way of trading is to know that the joy you give me is paid for by the joy you get from me - not by your suffering or mine. I don't accept sacrifices and I don't make them. If you asked me for more than you meant to me, I would refuse. If you asked me to give up the railroad, I'd leave you. If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud. You don't do it in business, Hank. Don't do it in your own life.

Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth - the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him, if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason you call it evil?

Miss Taggart, do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of your life to see a flicker of talent among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred? no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect? Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?

— Вы действительно считаете, что мы хотим, чтобы эти законы выполнялись? — продолжил доктор Феррис. — Мы хотим, чтобы их нарушали. Вам следует уяснить, что перед вами не команда бойскаутов, и тогда вы поймете, что наш век — не век красивых жестов. Сейчас время силы и власти. Вы вели осторожную игру, но мы знаем настоящий трюк, и вам надо научиться ему. Невозможно управлять невинными людьми. Единственная власть, которую имеет любое правительство, — это право применения жестоких мер по отношению к уголовникам. Что ж, когда уголовников не хватает, их создают. Столько вещей объявляется криминальными, что становится невозможно жить, не нарушая законов. Кому нужно государство с законопослушными гражданами? Что оно кому-нибудь даст? Но достаточно издать законы, которые невозможно выполнять, претворять в жизнь, объективно трактовать, — и вы создаете государство нарушителей законов и наживаетесь на вине. Вот какая система, мистер Реардэн, вот какая игра, и если вы ее поняли, с вами будет намного легче иметь дело.

"Now you see, that's the cruelty of conscientious people. You wouldn't understand it - would you? - if I answered that real devotion consists of being willing to lie, cheat and fake in order to make another person happy - to create for him the reality he wants, if he doesn't like the one that exists." "No," he said slowly, "I wouldn't understand it." "It's really very simple. If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It's no more than a fact and it has cost you nothing. But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake - and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem."

She looked ahead, at the haze that melted rail and distance, a haze that could rip apart at any moment to some shape of disaster. She wondered why she felt safer than she had ever felt in a car behind the engine, safer here, where it seemed as if, should an obstacle rise, her breast and the glass shield would be first to smash against it. She smiled, grasping the answer: it was the security of being first, with full sight and full knowledge of one's course - not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead. It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust, but to know.