Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. 

3/5 rating. 

Book #15 of 2020. Read March 8, 2020.

This was a BEAST of a book at 1,168 pages as you can see it compared to a 350 page book. This is considered Ayn’s magnum opus.

The novel follows a few key industrialists in a dystopic early twentieth-century America. The main characters are titans of the railroad and steel industries, and it follows their battle against a growing socialist and more-importantly, unthinking public. Going purely off of the story, I enjoyed the book (though it was about 750 pages too long), but this is more a statement of Randianism.

Ayn’s philosophy asserts radical individualism, and thought, and personal joy as the most supreme moral good. While I think these aspects sometimes tend to be undervalued, she goes to an unbelievable extreme, as the ticket into Atlantis in the story requires them to declare that: “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” 

The story is really just one long straw man about socialism and what radical libertarians like Ayn believe would happen if people began to help other people. Whether you like it or not, the picture painted of socialism here is laughable.

Purely because of the size of this book, it’s probably not worth your time, but I did think that the story was good. If you want a much shorter book about Ayn’s ideas, go read “Anthem”. 

Quotes I either liked or were just so shocking that someone believes them that I had to save:

“When he was asked what he would want to do, he answered at once, ‘Whatever is right,’”

“Hank Rearden is the kind of man who sticks his name on everything he touches. You may, from this, form your own opinion about the character of Hank Rearden.”

“To hell with that. I intend to make my own chance.”

“‘Francisco, what’s the most depraved type of human being?’ 

‘The man without a purpose.’”

“No matter how good you are, I’ll expect you to wring everything you’ve got, trying to be still better. And when you’ve worn yourself out to reach a goal, I’ll expect you to start for another.”

“‘Dagny,’ he asked, his voice low, ‘what is happening to people? Why did that statement succeed? It’s such an obvious smear-job, so obvious and so rotten. You’d think a decent person would throw it in the gutter. How could’ – his voice was breaking in gentle, desperate, rebellious anger – ‘how could they accept it? Didn’t they read it? Didn’t they see? Don’t they think? Dagny! What is it in people that let’s them do this – and how can we live with it?’”

“People have been criticizing the Institute, because, they say, we have not produced enough. The public has been demanding economy. In times like these, when their fat little comforts are threatened, you may be sure that science is the first thing men will sacrifice.”

“I don’t ask people to take greater chances on my ventures than I take myself. If it’s a gamble, I’ll match anybody’s gambling.”

“If you intend to keep your word, don’t talk about it, just do(ital) it.”

“Did you call it depravity? I am much more depraved than you are: you hold it as your guilt, and I – as my pride.”

“He could not be alone, not in the next few hours, yet there was nobody to call.”

“Miss Taggart, do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It’s resentment of another man’s achievement.”

“But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.”

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek.”

“If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him.”

“Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.”

“Oh, I can’t answer you. I don’t have any answers, my mind doesn’t work that way, but I don’t feel(ital) that you’re right, so I know that you’re wrong.”

“If this is what has beaten us, he thought, the guilt is ours.”

“Well, the man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures – which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value.”

“Their work was done. For the moment, there was no future. They had earned the present.”

“Ownership – she thought, glancing back at him – weren’t there those who knew nothing of its nature, and doubted its reality? No, it was not made of papers, seals, grants and permissions. There it was – in his eyes.”

“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.”

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

“No one’s happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.”

“She had learned, in the slums of her childhood, that honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted.”

“Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.”

“It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.”

“The name of this monstrous absurdly is Original Sin. A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality.”

“To hold, as man’s sin, a fact no open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.”

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