7 ago 2014

Atlas Shrugged

- "I´m sorry if I show you that I´m still opened to be hurt. It shouldn´t shock me that you´ve come to the stage where you despise achievement" -"Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it" -"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 stiil 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? "I... don´t know. What...could he do? What would you tell him?""To shrug" - "The country? You have no country to save, if its industries perish. You can sacrifice a leg or an arm. You can´t save a body without sacrificing its heart and brain."
- "It is a question that you have lost the right to ask" - Wisdom lies in knowing when to remember and when to forget." - "A prisioner brought to trial can defend himself only if there´s an objective principle of justice recognized by his judges, a principle upholding his rights, which they may not violate and which he can invoke. The law, by which your trying me, holds that there are no principles, that I have no rights, and that you may do with me whatever you please. Very well, do it."
-"But we are giving you a chance to defend yourself- and it is you who are rejecting it." I will not help you to pretend that I have a chance. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of righteousness where rights are not recognized. I will not help you to preserve an appearance of rationality by entering a debate in which a gun is the final argument. I will not help you to pretend that you are administering justice."
- "If you want to defeat any kind of vicious fraud-comply with it literally, adding nothing of your own to disguise its nature." -"The trainmaster knew nothing about political philosophy; but he knew that that had been the moment when he lost all concern for the life or death of any human being or of the country." - "Do not cry, when you reach it, that life is frustration and that happiness is impossible to man; check your fuel: it brough you were you wanted to go." - "If there are degrees of evil, it is hard to say who is the more contemptible: the brute who assumes the right to force the mind of others, or the moral degenerate who grants to other the right to force his mind."
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