"Sit down before fact with an open mind. Be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads or you learn nothing. Don’t push out figures when facts are going in the opposite direction."
"More than ambition, more than ability, it is rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest common denominator of human behavior. They are a substitute for rational thought."
"Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible."
Olin Shivers in comp.lang.scheme, April 2000
-- Douglas Adams
"No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable." -- Socrates
-- Frank Tyge (published a very long time ago).
- God (Morgan Freeman) to Bruce (Jim Carrey) in 'Bruce Almighty'
Avoid doing nothing and everything. Good luck.
1. The government passes a bill which limits the number of companies a person can own, Hank Rearden contemplates the purpose of doing anything when your achievements are being taken away:
"He stood at the window, trying not to think. But he kept hearing words in his mind: Rearden Ore... Rearden Coal... Rearden Steel... Rearden Metal... What was the use? Why had he done it? Why should he ever want to do anything again?...
His first day on the ledges of the ore mines... The day when he stood in the wind, looking down at the ruins of a steel plant... The day when he stood here, in this office, at this window, and thought that a bridge could be made to carry incredible loads on just a few bars of metal, if one combined a truss with an arch, if one built diagonal bracing with the top members curved to—
He stopped and stood still. He had not thought of combining a truss with an arch, that day.
In the next moment, he was at his desk, bending over it, with one knee on the seat of the chair, with no time to think of sitting down, he was drawing lines, curves, triangles, columns of calculations, indiscriminately on the blueprints, on the desk blotter, on somebody’s letters."
2. Hank Rearden crushes the opponents in court, but remains calm after victory understanding that his opponents want chaos:
"Rearden stood motionless, not turning to the crowd, barely hearing the applause. He stood looking at the judges. There was no triumph in his face, no elation, only the still intensity of contemplating the enormity of the smallness of the enemy who was destroying the world. He felt as if, after a journey of years through a landscape of devastation, past the ruins of great factories, the wrecks of powerful engines, the bodies of invincible men, he had come upon the despoiler, expecting to find a giant – and had found a rat eager to scurry for cover at the first sound of a human step. If this is what has beaten us, he thought, the guilt is ours."
3. The mills are attacked and defended, and Rearden understands the how the the philosophy determines people's actions, including his own:
"He lay still, alone in the silence of his office. He knew that the meaning of his mills had ceased to exist, and the fullness of the knowledge left no room for the pain of regretting an illusion. He had seen, in a final image, the soul and essence of his enemies: the mindless face of the thug with the club. It was not the face itself that made him draw back in horror, but the professors, the philosophers, the moralists, the mystics who had released that face upon the world.
He felt a peculiar cleanliness. It was made of pride and of love for this earth, this earth which was his, not theirs. It was the feeling which had moved him through his life, the feeling which some among men know in their youth, then betray, but which he had never betrayed and had carried within him as a battered, attacked, unidentified, but living motor—the feeling which he could now experience in its full, uncontested purity: the sense of his own superlative value and the superlative value of his life. It was the final certainty that his life was his, to be lived with no bondage to evil, and that that bondage had never been necessary. It was the radiant serenity of knowing that he was free of fear, of pain, of guilt."