Excerpts that I liked - Atlas Shrugged

• I don’t like the thing that’s happening to people, Miss Taggart. I don’t know. But I have watched them here for twenty years and I have seen the change. They used to rush through here and it was wonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were going and they were eager to get there. Now they are hurrying because they are afraid. It's not a purpose that drives them, it's fear. They're not going anywhere, they' re escaping. And I don’t think they know what it is that they want to escape. They don’t look at one another. They jerk when brushed against. They smile too much, but it's an ugly kind of smiling; it’s not joy, it's pleading. I don’t know what it is that’s happening to the world. Oh, well, who is John Galt? (Page 64)

• Her work was all she had or wanted. But there were times, like tonight, when she felt that sudden, peculiar emptiness, which was no emptiness, but silence, not despair, but immobility, as if nothing within her were destroyed, everything stood still. Then she felt the wish to find a moment's joy outside, the wish o be held as a passive spectator by some work or sight of greatness. Not to make it, she thought, but to accept; not to begin, but to respond; not to create, but to admire. I need to let me go on, she thought, because joy is one's fuel. She had always been - she closed her eyes with a faint smile of amusement and pain - the motive power of her own happiness. For once, she wanted to feel herself carried by the power of someone else's achievement. As men on a dark prairie liked to see the lighted windows of train going past, her achievement, the sight of power and purpose that gave them reassurance in the midst of empty miles and night - so she wanted to feel it for a moment, a brief greeting, a single glimpse, just to wave her arm and say: Someone is going somewhere… (Page 68)

• She realized that she had always felt a sense of light-hearted relaxation in his presence and known that he shared it. He was the only man she knew to whom she could speak without restrain or effort. This, she thought, was a mind she respected, an adversary worth matching. Yet there had always been an odd sense of distance between them, the sense of a closed door; there was an impersonal quality in his manner, something within him that could not be reached. (Page 86 - Dagny for Hank Rearden)

• What's the most depraved type of human being? - The man without a purpose. (Pg 98)

• There's nothing of importance in life - except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure for human value. All the codes of ethics they will try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard. When you grow up, you'll know what I mean. (Pg 98 - Frisco to Dagny)

• To Mrs. Taggart, the greatest surprise was the moment when she saw Dagny standing under the lights, looking at the ballroom. This was not a child, not a girl, but a woman of such confident, dangerous power that Mrs. Taggart stared at her with shocked admiration. In an age of casual, cynical, indifferent routine, among people who held themselves as if they were not flesh, but metal - Dagny's bearing seemed almost indecent, because this was the way a woman would have faced a ballroom centuries ago, when the act of displaying one's half-naked body for the admiration of men was an act of daring, when it had meaning, and but one meaning, acknowledged by all as a high adventure. And this - thought Mrs. Taggart, smiling - was the girl she had believed to be devoid of sexual capacity. She felt an immense relief, and a touch of amusement at the thought that a discovery of this kind should make her relieved. (Pg 101)

• She wore slacks or summer cotton dresses, yet she was never so feminine as when she stood beside him, sagging in his arms, abandoning herself to anything he wished, in open acknowledgment of his power to reduce her to helplessness by the pleasure he had the power to give her. He taught her every manner of sensuality he could invent. "Isn't I wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure?" he said to her once, quite simply. They were happy and radiantly innocent. They were both incapable of the conception that joy is sin. They kept their secret from the knowledge of others, not as shameful guilt, but as a thing that was immaculately theirs, beyond anyone's right of debate or appraisal. She knew the general doctrine on sex, held by people in one form or another, the doctrine that sex was an ugly weakness of man's lower nature, to be condoned regretfully. She experienced an emotion of chastity that made her shrink not from the desires of her body, but from any contact with the minds who held this doctrine. (Pg 106)