Tag Archives: atlas shrugged

A Tribute To Ayn Rand And The Spirit Of America

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A Tribute to Ayn Rand

I posted this in 2008 and I’m reposting it from PopModal today because it seems to be corrupted on my blog and the youtube version has vanished

Projwal Shreshta  compiled the quotations from “Atlas Shrugged” and the music, which is Divano, by Era.

From “Atlas Shrugged”:

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”

“What is morality, she asked.
Judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. ”

“The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.”

“I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.”

“I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn’t hold a stillborn aspiration. I’d want to have it, to make it, to live it.”

“I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.”

“Every form of happiness is one, every desire is driven by the same motor.- by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of  our own existence — and every achievement is an expression of it.

“Every man builds his world in his own image; 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.”

“Morality is judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, and integrity to stand by it at any price.”

“Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment’s torture.”

“Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.”

“I am. Therefore I’ll think.”

“The choice–the dedication to one’s highest potential–is made by accepting the fact that the noblest act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four.”

“There was no meaning in motors or factories; that their only meaning is in man’s enjoyment of his life, which they served – and that my swelling admiration at the sight of achievement was for the man from which it came.”

“For the power and the radiant vision within him which had seen the earth as a place of enjoyment and had known that the work of achieving one’s happiness was the purpose the sanction and the meaning of life.”

More quotations listed conveniently here:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

Atlas Flubbed

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Just to rile up market fundamentalists, here’s a sharp jab from a lefty blog at “going Galt” – the fantasy nurtured by some naive libertarians that were capitalists (theorized as financiers) to take a day off, society would collapse.

(The reference to Galt is a reference to Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a book about which I have mixed feelings. Rand is a far more complex and interesting figure than either her defenders or her critics seem to realize..)

The quote below confuses genuine capitalists and the predator financiers currently in power, but it packs some punch:

“Have you heard of the documentary, “A Day Without A Mexican?” You know why it’s not called Atlas Shrugged? Because the people who made it aren’t utterly detached from reality. Because doing actual work gives one perspective. Because spending the day going from rooftop to rooftop in a helicopter to chew the fat with other geniuses could lead you to believe you’re the glue that holds the entire planet together. People who don’t have private islands have a more realistic idea of what they do to contribute to society.

You know why the uber-wealthy don’t go on strike? Because they know there are millions of smart, hardworking people ready to take their places…..”

My Comment

What I’d like to know is why more people don’t vote with their pocket books against this predator class. For instance, I try to avoid using Microsoft Word because of my antipathy to Gates’ monopolistic practices.

The issue is not capitalism, ultimately. It’s monopoly and the absence of competition. In other words, it’s the absence of real free markets that’s the reason why “capitalism” is now synonymous with predation — and why rants like this are increasingly persuasive.