Atlas Shrugged

I had read this book years before, but now I was forced to read it again for an essay competition. Ayn Rand is too rajasic for me. Yes, most of what she says makes sense. But to generalize all Indian sadhus as mystic mucks is a bit antagonizing. Am wondering what she would say, to the current organizations, which in addition to making profit (skinning of customers as she would say) have CSR to shoulder, with climate change, sustainability, inclusive growth and green production. The money speech of Francisco d’Anconia made absolute sense. The following of some of the lines that caught my attention in this hurried second reading.

"What you think you think is an illusion created by your glands, your emotions and, in the last analysis, by the content of your stomach."

"That gray matter you're so proud of is like a mirror in an amusement park which transmits to you nothing but distorted signals from a reality forever beyond your grasp."

"The more certain you feel of your rational conclusions, the more certain you are to be wrong. Your brain being an instrument of distortion, the more active the brain the greater the distortion."

"The giants of the intellect, whom you admire so much, once taught you that the earth was flat and that fallacies, not of achievements."

"The more we know, the more we learn that we know nothing."

"Only the crassest ignoramus can still hold to the old-fashioned notion that seeing is believing. That which you see is the first thing to disbelieve."

"A scientist knows that a stone is not a stone at all. It is, in fact, identical with a feather pillow. Both are only a cloud formation of the same invisible, whirling particles. But, you say, you can't use a stone for a pillow? Well, that merely proves your helplessness in the face of actual reality."

"You see, Dr. Stadler, people don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue—a highly intellectual virtue—out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt."

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?"

"I've never despised luxury," he said, "yet I've always despised those who enjoyed it. I looked at what they called their pleasures and it seemed so miserably senseless to me—after what I felt at the mills.

"Are you saying," he asked slowly, "that I rose in your estimation when you found that I wanted you?"
"Of course."
"That's not the reaction of most people to being wanted."
"It isn't."
"Most people feel that they rise in their own eyes, if others want them.".

I'm Mrs. Taggart. I'm the woman in this family now."
"That's quite all right," said Dagny. "I'm the man.”
"We are at the dawn of a new age," said James Taggart, from above the rim of his champagne glass.
"We are breaking up the vicious tyranny of economic power. We will set men free of the rule of the dollar. We will release our spiritual aims from dependence on the owners of material means. We will liberate our culture from the stranglehold of the profit-chasers. We will build a society dedicated to higher ideals, and we will replace the aristocracy of money by—the aristocracy of pull

Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire
philosophy of life.
Show me the woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself.
You're the man who's spent his life shaping matter to the purpose of his mind. You're the man who would know that just as an idea unexpressed in physical
action is contemptible hypocrisy, so is platonic love—and just as physical action unguided by an idea is a fool's self-fraud, so is sex when cut off from one's code of values.

Now you're willing to do it at the price of accepting the position of a criminal and
the risk of being thrown in jail at any moment—for the sake of keeping in existence a system which can be kept going only by its victims, only by the breaking of its own laws." Reminded me of the court scene in the movie Guru.


So he waited, holding his love in the place of the hope which he had no right to hold.
From then on, people helped Wesley Mouch to advance, for the same reason
as that which had prompted Uncle Julius: they were people who believed that mediocrity was safe.

"I know that everything is relative and that nobody can know anything and that reason is an illusion and that there isn't any reality.

"Mountains . . ." said Gilbert Keith-Worthing, with satisfaction.
"It is a spectacle of this kind that makes one feel the insignificance of man.' What is this presumptuous little bit of rail, which crude materialists are so proud of building—compared to that eternal grandeur? No more than the basting thread of a seamstress on the hem of the garment of nature. If a single one of those granite giants chose to crumble, it would annihilate this train."

Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no
matter how small or in what form, the sense of an activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time

But the looters—by their own stated theory—are in desperate, permanent, congenital need and at the blind mercy of matter Eddie?—we're on a dead planet, like
the moon, where we must move, but dare not stop for a breath of feeling or we'll discover that there is no air to breathe.

the belief that disasters are one's natural fate, to be borne, not fought. I can't accept submission. I can't accept helplessness. I can't accept renunciation. So long as there's a railroad left to run, I'll run it."

we were taught that some things belong to God and others to Caesar. Perhaps their God would permit it. But the man you say we're serving—he docs not permit it. He permits no divided allegiance, no war between your mind and your body, no gulf between your values and your actions, no tributes to Caesar. He permits no Caesars."
To me, she was not a person and not . . .not a woman. She was the railroad. And I didn't think that anyone would ever have the audacity to look at her in any other way.

"Any man who's afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat who's in a business where he doesn't belong. To me—the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good. That's what I've always thought and—say, what are you laughing at?"

. . . There is reason, she thought, why a woman would wish to cook for a man . . . oh, not as a duty, not as a chronic career, only as a rare and special rite in symbol of . . . but what have they made of it, the preachers of woman's duty? . . . The castrated performance of a sickening drudgery was held to be a woman's proper virtue—while that which gave it meaning and sanction was held as a shameful sin . . . the work of dealing with grease, steam and slimy peelings in a reeking kitchen was held to be a spiritual matter, an act of compliance with her moral duty—while the meeting of two bodies in a bedroom was held to be a physical indulgence, an act of surrender to an animal instinct, with no glory, meaning or pride of spirit to be claimed by the animals involved.

Only if some one is there, i cook elaborate meals, experimenting with various recipes from internet. Left to myself, am too lazy to cook most of the days, and even if i do, i end up eating green things, horse gram, mostly fruits for dinner and veggies, noodles and things that can be cooked in less than 5 minutes.
Just yes'day i had to listen to a 3 hour crib session over phone of yet another husband who was complaining about his wife, who never cooked food for him in time. So much hoopla over food.


"I did love you once," she said dully, "but it wasn't what you wanted. I loved you for your courage, your ambition, your ability. But it wasn't real, any of it."

"You fear the man who has a dollar less than you, that dollar is rightfully his, he makes you feel like a moral defrauder. You hate the man who has a dollar more than you, that dollar is rightfully yours, he makes you feel that you are morally defrauded. The man below is a source of your guilt, the man above is a source of your frustration. You do not know what to surrender or demand, when to give and when to grab, what pleasure in life is rightfully yours and what debt is still unpaid to others—you struggle to evade, as 'theory,' the knowledge that by the moral standard you've accepted you are guilty every moment of your life, there is no mouthful of food you swallow that is not needed by someone somewhere on earth—and you give up the problem in blind resentment, you conclude that moral perfection is not to
be achieved or desired, that you will muddle through by snatching as snatch can and by avoiding the eyes of the young, of those who look at you as if self-esteem were possible and they expected you to have it. Guilt is all that you retain within your soul—and so does every other man, as he goes past, avoiding your eyes. Do you wonder why your morality has not achieved brotherhood on earth or the good will of man
to man?

Random females with causeless incomes flitter on trips around the globe and return to deliver the message that the backward peoples of the world demand a higher standard of living.

What permits any insolent beggar to wave his sores in the face of his betters and to plead for help in the tone of a threat?