Atlas Shrugged

The life appropriate to a human being—the life appropriate to a rational being—is not a luxury above the basic requirements of survival. It is the basic requirement of survival. On the individual level, the person who refuses to think, to act, to pursue values, either perishes outright or exists as a parasite on the efforts of persons more rational

What we view as a social injustice is merely someone’s method of seeking happiness. If you think that someone or some group of people is unjustly poor, your opinion implies that someone else should be giving them more money — through jobs or charity. That “someone else” is the person whose happiness seeking methods disturb you.

There are lots of good reasons why murder is usually a really bad thing: you cause distress to the friends and family of the murdered, you cause society to lose a potentially valuable member in which it has already invested a lot of food and education and resources, and you take away the life of a person who had already invested a lot into it. But

To anticipate a common misunderstanding at this point: If a man continually neglects a wife he loves—goes off to a party, leaves her ill at home and unattended—and if she leaves him and he is then devastated and miserable, we might say that he was “selfish.” But it would be truer to say that he had a fool’s notion of his self-interest. His irration