"'Of what importance is an individual in the titanic collective achievements of our industrial age?'"
"The passengers paid no attention; one more heat of steel being poured was not an event they had been taught to notice."
"He felt that he could forgive anything to anyone, because happiness was the greatest agent of purification."
"He could not condemn without understanding; and he could not understand."
"His life had been a summary of the lives of all the men whose reward is a monument in a public park a hundred years after the time when a reward can matter - except that Richard Halley did not die soon enough."
"'Men have to get together and find a way out. But who's to decide which way to take, unless it's the majority? I guess that's the only fair method of deciding, I don't see any other. I suppose somebody's got to be sacrificed. If it turned out to be me, I have no right to complain. The right's on their side. Men have to get together."
"This, she knew, was a tribute of feeling free to acknowledge one's own greatest, knowing that it is understood."
"'It seems to me that there are other things in the world.'
'Let others think about them'"
"'I've hired you to do a job, not to do your best - whatever that is.'"
"She sat, watching him in the manner of a scientist: assuming nothing, discarding emotion, seeking only to observe and to understand."
"'Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."
"Their work was done. For the moment, there was no future. They had earned the present."
"She smiled, grasping the answer: it was the security of being first, with full sight and full knowledge of one's course - not the blind sense of being pulled into the unknown by some unknown power ahead. It was the greatest sensation of existence: not to trust, but to know."
"'Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth.'"
"'You wouldn't understand it - would you? - if I answered that real devotion consists of being willing to lie, cheat and fake in order to make another person happy - to create for him the reality he wants, if he doesn't like the one that exists.'"
"'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.'"
"'So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue - a highly intellectual virtue - out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt.'"
"She had ordered him out of her office, and had sat in incredulous horror before the fact that the most vicious statement she had ever heard had been uttered in a tone of moral righteousness."
"'But there is no justification for a society in which a man is expected to manufacture the weapons for his own murderers.'"
"'Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and effort.'"
"'Americans were the first to to understand that wealth is to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.'"
"'If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud.'"
"'By what standard of value do you judge your days?'"
"'A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the furnace, besides.'"
"'If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders - what would you tell him to do? [...] to shrug.'"
"'All business is just dirty politics and all politics is just dirty business.'"
"'I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life.'"
"'Nobody should be allowed to waste money on the new until everybody has plenty of the old.'"
"'If we teach a man that it's evil to look at spring flowers and he believes us and then does it - we'll be able to do whatever we please with him.He won't defend himself. He won't feel he's worth it. He won't fight. But save us from the man who lives up to his own standards. Save us from the man of clean conscience. He's the man who'll beat us.'"
"'Is only evil real and possible?'"
"He had no desire to be a martyr for the sake of allowing people safely to indulge in their own irresponsible evil."
"'It was out own guilt. We produced the wealth of the world - but we let our enemies write its moral code.'"
"...was this to be the final sum: an end lower than the beginning?"
"...they know that there's no such thing as a lousy job - only louse men who don't care to do it."
"...and had known that the work of achieving one's happiness was the purpose, the sanction and the meaning of life."
"'Every other kind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable - except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. Well, their turn has come [...] This is the strike of the men of the mind"
"'It is a code that thrives not on those who observe it, but on those who don't, a morality kept in existence not by virtue of its saints, but by the grace of its sinners.'"
"'He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence - by his own choice.'"
"She thought, in bitter compassion, of how much he had failed to see. And I? - she thought."
"...she had now experienced it in both roles and knew that no action could be lower or more futile than for one person to throw upon another the burden of his abdication of choice."
"...nothing had barred you from Atlantis and there were no chains to hold you, except the chains you were willing to wear."
"They seemed to be waiting to be told what to think."
"...he knew that the words they were eager to absorb and believe were the chains slipping in to hold them, like the goats, securely within the range of those funnels."
"'If this now makes me a disgraced woman in your eyes - let your estimate be your own concern. I will stand on mine.'"
"'It was I who kept our love hidden as a guilty secret - they merely treated it for what it was by my own appraisal.'"
"If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to lean."
"'Jim, what is it that you want to be loved for?'"
"...each was devouring himself, while screaming in terror that some unknowable evil was destroying the earth."
"They stopped, like men on an ocean liner propelled by ten-thousand-horsepower generators, but perishing for the lack of a safety pin."
"They acted like savages performing a ritual devised to set them free of objective reality."
"'This age of misery is God's punishment to man for the sin of relying on his mind!'"
"...the men who live by pulling levers at an electric switchboard, are not easily ruled, but men who live by digging the soil with their naked fingers, are - that the feudal baron did not need electronic factories in order to drink his brains away out of jeweled goblets, and neither did the rajahs of the People's State of India."
"...that thousands of tons of metal and lives might pass in speeding streaks, a breath away from one another, protected by nothing but a thought , the thought of the man who devised the levers."
"...that the justice that would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil."
"'and men can't live... if rotten bastards... like the ones in Washington... get away with things like... like the ones they're doing tonight... if everything becomes a stinking fake... men can't live that way"
"'An 'instinct' is an unerring and automatic form of knowledge. A desire is not an instinct. A desire to live does not give you the knowledge required for living."
"'No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.'"
"'His own happiness is man's only moral purpose, but only his own virtue can achieve it.'"
"'Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out.'"
"'For centuries the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket - by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt'"
"'In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.'"
"...a pudgy hanger-on of the metallurgical industry, who had wanted nothing but to follow his employees while going through the motions of leading."
