There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. Matter is indestructible, it changes its forms, but it cannot cease to exist. It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death.
The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive—a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society—a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself.
Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not.
But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival—so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think.'
the mind on the divide is a switch: click it to throw
Dropping below the level of a savage, who believes that the magic words he utters have the power to alter reality, they believe that reality can be altered by the power of the words they do not utter—and their magic tool is the blank-out, the pretense that nothing can come into existence past the voodoo of their refusal to identify it.
Man's life is the standard of morality, but your own life is its purpose.
All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.
If existence on earth is your goal, you must choose your actions and values by the standard of that which is proper to man—for the purpose of preserving, fulfilling and enjoying the irreplaceable value which is your life.
If you pursue a course of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that brings you no value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no reward—if you achieve this state of total zero, you have achieved the ideal of moral perfection.
To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason—Purpose—Self-esteem.
Reason, as his only tool of knowledge
Purpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must proceed to achieve
Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty that his mind is competent to think and his person is worthy of happiness, which means: is worthy of living.
click a ring to remove it, and the virtues resting on it fail
You have sacrificed reason to faith.
You have sacrificed happiness to duty.
You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial.
the recognition applies to existence, and your own mind
the mind is one's only judge of values and one's only guide of action—that reason is an absolute that permits no compromise—that a concession to the irrational invalidates one's consciousness and turns it from the task of perceiving to the task of faking reality—that the alleged short-cut to …
thinking is the root, the other six proceed from it: hover any one to read it
'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. 'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil.
The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities.
Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.
Whenever you rebel against causality, your motive is the fraudulent desire, not to escape it, but worse: to reverse it.
You want unearned love, as if love, the effect, could give you personal value, the cause
So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me? no man may start—the use of physical force against others.
Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.
Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler with the ultimatum: 'Your money or your life,' or a politician who confronts a country with the ultimatum: 'Your children's education or your life,' the meaning of that ultimatum is: 'Your mind or your life'—and neither is possible to man without the other.
click the gun to fire again
An action not caused by an entity would be caused by a zero, which would mean a zero controlling a thing, a nonentity controlling an entity, the non-existent ruling the existent—which is the universe of your teachers' desire, the cause of their doctrines of causeless action, the reason of their revolt against reason, the goal of their morality, their politics, their economics, the ideal they strive for: the reign of the zero.
I read Atlas Shrugged because I saw that it's the most mentioned book on a certain forum and jumped into it blindly.
The controversy hit when I went online after to see what others thought. As I found, there are two constants in every debate: the John Rogers quote and people rolling their eyes at The Speech.
Maybe this page helps as a brief overview. Every passage here is quoted exactly. Nothing is paraphrased, and nothing is stitched together from two places.
The second book I got from the same reading list is Snow Crash. Somehow, I am less prepared than I was before.