Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 352

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Atlas Shrugged," by Ayn Rand.

"Dagny," she asked once, "don't you ever want to have a good time?" Dagny looked at her incredulously and answered, "What do you think I'm having?"

"Muscles, Miss Taggart," Ben Nealy, the contractor, had said to her, "muscles—that's all it takes to build anything in the world."

"And it's not that I want you to have them. I want you to have them from me."

But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires.

The newspapers had snarled that the cause of the country's troubles, as this case demonstrated, was the selfish greed of rich industrialists; that it was men like Hank Rearden who were to blame for the shrinking diet, the falling temperature and the cracking roofs in the homes of the nation; that if it had not been for men who broke regulations and hampered the government's plans, prosperity would have been achieved long ago; and that a man like Hank Rearden was prompted by nothing but the profit motive. This last was stated without explanation or elaboration, as if the words "profit motive" were the self-evident brand of ultimate evil.

"Mr. Rearden, the law which you are denouncing is based on the highest principle—the principle of the public good." 

"Who is the public? What does it hold as its good? There was a time when men believed that the good' was a concept to be defined by a code of moral values and that no man had the right to seek his good through the violation of the rights of another. If it is now believed that my fellow men may sacrifice me in any manner they please for the sake of whatever they deem to be their own good, if they believe that they may seize my property simply because they need it—well, so does any burglar. There is only this difference: the burglar does not ask me to sanction his act."

"What kind of work are you looking for?" 

"People don't look for kinds of work any more, ma'am," he answered impassively. "They just look for work."

"And what's going to happen if you leave a train stalled on the line?" 

"That's not my fault. I had nothing to do with it. They can't blame me. I couldn't help it." 

"You're to help it now." 

"Nobody told me to." 

"I'm telling you to!" 

"How do I know whether you're supposed to tell me or not? We're not supposed to furnish any Taggart crews. You people were to run with your own crews. That's what we were told." 

"But this is an emergency!" 

"Nobody told me anything about an emergency." 

She had to take a few seconds to control herself.