Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged

Notes and reflections.

- log notes about the book on phone to here

• Hard work and intelligence making itself evident across the face of the earth, the world is what we make of it.
• Unbreached rationality is the only way to ethically live your life. On an action for life or actions for death spectrum, irrationality brings you closer to that which you do not like, or do not want (death). More specifically, the death of living. This may not be death in itself, but it would merely be surviving instead of living. Rationality hopes to bring us closer to thriving in life, and having effects on those around us that are positive, and more closely aligned with what we value in the world. 

- listen to interview saved on YouTube

- log quotes that are on phone and comment on them

• "But do you know that it works in exactly the same way as what you did at your trial? If you want to defeat any kind of vicious fraud - comply with it literally, adding nothing of your own to disguise its nature."
• "'Then when it happened, I thought that life was much more wonderful than I had expected. And now to get used to the idea that life and people are much more horrible than anything I had imagined and that my marriage was not a glorious miracle, but some unspeakable kind of evil which I'm still afraid to learn fully - that is what I can't force myself to take. I can't get past it.' She glanced up suddenly. 'Dagny, how did you do it? How did you manage to remain unmangled?'
  'By holding to just one rule.'
  'Which?'
  'To place nothing -nothing- above the verdict of my own mind.' 
  'You've taken some horrible beatings... maybe worse than I did... worse than any of us... What held you through it?'
  'The knowledge that my life is the highest of values, too high to give up without a fight.'
  She saw a look of astonishment, of incredulous recognition on Cherryl's face, as if the girl were struggling to recapture some sensation across a span of years. 'Dagny' - her voice was a whisper - 'that's... that's what I felt when I was a child... that's what I seem to remember most about myself... that kind of feeling... and I never lost it, it's there, it's always been there, but as I grew up, I thought it was something that I must hide. ... I never had any name for it, but just now, when you said it, it stuck me that that's what it was... Dagny, to feel that way about your own life - is that good?'
  'Cherryl, listen to me carefully: that feeling - with everything which it requires and implies - is the highest, noblest and only good thing on earth.'
• "'The name of this monstrous absurdity 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. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice 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.'"
• "'Use the last of your strength to understand its meaning. You're still alive. You have a chance.
  '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. Sacrifice is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don't.'"
• "'Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality - not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.
  'Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any breach or morality. Give the benefit of the doubt to those who seek to know; but treat as potential killers those specimens of insolent depravity who make demands upon you, announcing that they have and seek no reasons, proclaiming as a licence, that they 'just feel it' - or those who reject an irrefutable argument by saying: 'It's only logic.' which means: 'It's only reality.' The only realm opposed to reality is the realm and premise of death.'"
• "'Suffering as such is not a value; only man's fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. But to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim - is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values. A man who has no virtues is a hater of existence who acts on the premise of death; to help him is to sanction his evil and to support his career of destruction. Be it only a penny you will not miss or a kindly smile he has not earned, a tribute to a zero is treason to life and to all those who struggle to maintain it. It is of such pennies and smiles that the desolation of your world was made.'"