Galt's Gulch

Atlas Shrugged, Part 3 Chapter 7: “This Is John Galt Speaking”

Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago to Books
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Summary: Hank Rearden joined the strike. Dagny was called in to Mr. Thompson’s broadcast on November 22. They observed technical difficulties. John Galt interrupted the broadcast. [To help you find them in your own book, quotes from Galt's speech are referenced by paragraph number.]

Start by reading the first-tier comments, which are all quotes of Ayn Rand (some of my favorites, some just important for other reasons). Comment on your favorite ones, or others' comments. Don't see your favorite quote? Post it in a new comment. Please reserve new comments for Ayn Rand, and your non-Rand quotes for "replies" to the quotes or discussion. (Otherwise Rand's quotes will get crowded out and pushed down into oblivion. You can help avoid this by "voting up" the Rand quotes, or at least the ones you especially like, and voting down first-tier comments that are not quotes of the featured book.)

Atlas Shrugged was written by Ayn Rand in 1957.

My idea for this post is discussed here:

http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts...

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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 298: “I swear – by my life and my love of it – that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 291: “Then this country will once more become a sanctuary for a vanishing species: the rational being. The political system we will build is contained in a single moral premise: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 273: “But the government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality: such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of man’s deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 269: “A is A – and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 280: “The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains. Such is the nature of the ‘competition’ between the strong and the weak of the intellect. Such is the pattern of ‘exploitation’ for which you have damned the strong.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 276: “Look past the range of the moment, you who cry that you fear to compete with men of superior intelligence, that their mind is a threat to your livelihood, that the strong leave no chance to the weak in a market of voluntary trade. What determines the material value of your work? Nothing but the productive effort of your mind – if you lived on a desert island.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 273: “The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach and fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 272: “The source of property rights is the law of causality. All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man’s mind and labor. As you cannot have effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without its source: without intelligence.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 271: “The doctrine that ‘human rights’ are superior to ‘property rights’ simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle. Whoever regards this as human and right, has no right to the title of ‘human.’”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 262: “As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man’s demand for your help. To demand it is to claim that your life is his property – and loathsome as such claim might be, there’s something still more loathsome: your agreement. Do you ask if it’s ever proper to help another man? No – if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes – if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 261: “Discard the protective rags of that vice which you called a virtue: humility – learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness – and when you learn that pride is the sum of all virtues, you will learn to live like a man.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 259: “Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality – not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 242: “When the thugs of Europe’s People’s States snarl that you are guilty of intolerance, because you don’t treat your desire to live and their desire to kill you as a difference of opinion – you cringe and hasten to assure them that you are not intolerant of any horror.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 241: “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil… In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 232: “No matter what dishonorable compromise you’ve made with your impracticable creed, no matter what miserable balance, half-cynicism, half-superstition, you now manage to maintain, you still preserve the root, the lethal tenet: the belief that the moral and the practical are opposites….then your choice is to be moral or to live.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 219: “You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others – that you’re unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler – that you’re unable to earn your living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own definition of your capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 214: “I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win – and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was ‘No.’”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 213: “Then, one night at a factory meeting, I heard myself sentenced to death by reason of my achievement. I heard three parasites assert that my brain and my life were their property, that my right to exist was conditional and depended on the satisfaction of their desires. The purpose of my ability, they said, was to serve the needs of those who were less able. I had no right to live, they said, by reason of my competence for living; their right to live was unconditional, by reason of their incompetence.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 189: “They proclaim that every man born is entitled to exist without labor and, the laws of reality to the contrary notwithstanding, is entitled to receive his ‘minimum sustenance’ – his food, his clothes, his shelter – with no effort on his part, as his due and his birthright. To receive it – from whom? Blank-out.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 188: “The problem of production, they tell you, has been solved and deserves no study or concern; the only problem left for your ‘reflexes’ to solve is now the problem of distribution. Who solved the problem of production? Humanity, they answer. What was the solution? The goods are here. How did they get here? Somehow. What caused it? Nothing has causes.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 164: “The law of identity does not permit you to have your cake and eat it, too. The law of causality does not permit you to eat your cake before you have it.”
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  • Posted by nsnelson 9 years ago
    Galt 146: “Love is the expression of one’s values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.”
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