98 Quotes About Dagny-taggart

It is not proper for man’s life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him—man’s life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum.

She sat beside him in the car, feeling no desire to speak, knowing that neither of them could conceal the meaning of their silence.

This was men’s moral code in the outer world, a code that told them to act on the premise of one another’s weakness, deceit and stupidity, and this was the pattern of their lives, this struggle through a fog of the pretended and unacknowledged, this belief that facts are not solid or final, this state where, denying any form to reality, men stumble through life, unreal and unformed, and die having never been born.

She noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same sense she felt when looking at people: only her distance from people seemed longer.

There was so calm, so natural, so total a certainty in the sound of her voice that the mere sound seemed to carry an immense persuasiveness.

No battle was hard, no decision was dangerous where there was no soggy uncertainty, no shapeless evasion to encounter.

He was searching for words to name his meaning without naming it, she thought, to make her understand that which he did not want to be understood.

She marveled at the futility of his method: he was acting as if, by naming her opinion in advance, he would make her unable to alter it.

I’m not going to help you pretend—by arguing with you—that the reality you’re talking about is not what it is, that there’s still a way to make it work and to save your neck. There isn’t.