Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1957)

• Evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.

• 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.

• It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener.

• Rationality is the recognition of the fact that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it.

• The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.

• The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

• There is no necessity for pain--why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity?--we who hold the love and the secret of joy, to what punishment have we been sentenced for it, and by whom?

• Haven't I? -- he thought. Haven't I thought of it since the first time I saw you? Haven't I thought of nothing else for two years?. . . He sat motionless, looking at her. He hear the words he never allowed himself to form, the words he had felt, known, yet had no faced, had hoped to destroy by never letting them be within his own mind, Now it was as sudden and shocking as if he were saying it to her…Since the first time I saw you…. Nothing but your body, that mouth of yours, and the way your eyes would look at me, if…. Through every sentence I ever said to you, through every conference you thought were so safe, through the importance of all the issues we discussed…. You trusted me, didn't you? To recognize greatness? To think of you as you deserved -- as if you were a man?

• Love is our response to our highest values.

• She thought suddenly that she was wrong about his lack of emotion: the hidden undertone of his manner was enjoyment. 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 strain 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 in impersonal quality in his manner, something within him that could not be reached.

• She was twelve years old when she told Eddie Willers that she would run the railroad when they grew up. She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought---and never worried about it again.

• So you think you're sure of your opinions? You cannot be sure of anything. Are you going to endanger the harmony of your community, your fellowship with your neighbors, your standing, reputation, good name and financial security--for the sake of an illusion? For the sake of a mirage of thinking that you think? Are you going to run risks and court disasters---at a precarious time like ours---by opposing the existing social order in the name of those imaginary notions of yours which you call your convictions? You say that you're so right? Nothing is right, or ever can be.

• Rationality is the recognition of the fact that existence exists, that nothing can alter the truth and nothing can take precedence over that act of perceiving it, which is thinking...

• 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.

• Why ask useless questions? How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? Who is John Galt?

• I'll give you a hint. 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.