“The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make? 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, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station to – oh, stop it!”

“The sun touched the tree tops on the slope of the hill, and they looked a bluish-silver, catching the color of the sky. Dagny stood at the door of the cabin, with the first sunrays on her forehead and miles of forest spread under her feet. The leaves went down from silver to green to the smoky blue of the shadows on the road below. The light trickled down through the branches and shot upward in sudden spurts when it hit a clump of ferns that became a fountain of green rays. It gave her pleasure to watch the motion of the light over a stillness where nothing else could move.”

d'Anconia: “Dagny, we who’ve been called ‘materialists’ by the killers of the human spirit, we’re the only ones who know how little value or meaning there is in material objects as such, because we’re the ones who create their value and meaning… You do not have to depend on any material possessions, they depend on you, you create them, you own the one and only tool of production.”

d'Anconia to Dagny: “We produced the wealth of the world – but we let our enemies write its moral code.”
“But we never accepted their code. We lived by our own standards.”
“Yes – and we paid ransoms for it! Ransoms in matter and in spirit – in money, which our enemies received, but did not deserve, and in honor, which we deserved, but did not receive. That was our guilt – that we were willing to pay. We kept mankind alive, yet we allowed men to despise us and to worship our destroyers. We allowed them to worship incompetence and brutality, the recipients and the dispensers of the unearned. By accepting punishment, not for any sins, but for our virtues, we betrayed our code and made theirs possible. Dagny, theirs is the morality of kidnappers. They use your love of virtue as a hostage. They know that you’ll bear anything in order to work and produce, because you know that achievement is man’s highest moral purpose, that he can’t exist without it, and your love of virtue is your love of life… Your generosity and your endurance are their only tools. Your unrequited rectitude is the only hold they have upon you. They know it. You don’t.”

Dagny to d’Anconia: “It’s surrender, if we leave – and surrender, if we remain. I don’t know what is right any longer.”
“Check your premises, Dagny. Contradictions don’t exist.”

Dagny to a storekeeper: “If you know that the road gets flooded every time it rains, why don’t you people repair it?” The woman answered, “The road’s always been that way.”