All Quotes

"In economics you cannot convict your opponent of error; you can only convince him of it. And, even if you are right, you cannot convince him, if there is a defect in your own powers of persuasion and exposition or if his head is already so filled with contrary notions that he cannot catch the clues to your thought which you are trying to throw to him."

"Shaw and Stalin are still satisfied with Marx’s picture of the capitalist world… They look backwards to what capitalism was, not forward to what it is becoming."

"Communism draws its strength from deeper, more serious sources. Offered to us as a means of improving the economic situation, it is an insult to our intelligence. But offered as a means of making the economic situation worse, that is its subtle, its almost irresistible, attraction. Communism is not a reaction against the failure of the nineteenth century to organize optimal economic output. It is a reaction against its comparative success."

"She smashed her knuckles into winter/ As autumn's wind fades into black/She is the saint of all the sinners/ The one who's fallen through the cracks"

"You made your bed in salad days amongst the ruins / Ashes to ashes of our youth"

"Little girl, Little girl you dirty liar/ You're just a junkie preaching to the choir"

"The traces of blood always follow you home / Like the mascara tears from your getaway"

"I was made of poison and blood"

"You're in ruins"

"We are the cries of the class of '13!/ Born in the era of humility!"

"I think I'm losing whats left of my mind/to the 20th century deadline"

"My name is no-one, the long lost son/Born on the fourth of July/Raised in the era of heroes and cons/That left me for dead or alive!"

"I am a nation, a worker, of pride/My debt to the status quo/The scars on my hands are a means to an end/It's all that I have to show!"

""I praise liberty/ the freedom to obey/ it's the song that strangles me!/"

"I set the fire, just to see the flame."

"I am a nation without bureaucratic ties/Deny the allegations – as it’s written, fucking lies!"

"(Johnny) Don't want to be an American Idiot. Don't want a nation under the new media!"

"(Will) And can you hear the sound of hysteria! The subliminal mind-fuck America!"

"(Tunny) Welcome to a new kind of tension. All across the idiot nation. Where everything isn't meant to be okay!"

"(All three) Television dreams of tomorrow. They're not the ones meant to follow."

"(Someone from Jingletown) Well maybe I'm the faggot America! Not apart of the Redneck agenda!"

"Green Day injected a fist full of melodic punk rock into the ‘90s music scene, which later paved the groundwork for pop-punk in the late ‘90s and early 2000s."

"When you pick up a guitar for the first time, Green Day are a solid band to dive into as their songs are rewarding to learn while being easy to comprehend in a relatively short time frame. Forget everything the 60-year-old guitar shop employee pressures you into about learning Deep Purple or Led Zeppelin. “Basket Case” will be a lot more fun to pick through while trying to get your head wrapped around the basics."

"Here's a true story: a member of our staff once told a friend they were going to see Green Day. The friend thought they were talking about an environmental fair, not a raucous night of punk pop. Enough said."

"Who is John Galt?"

"He liked to observe emotions; they were like red lanterns strung along the dark unknown of another's personality, marking vulnerable points."

"She was twelve years old when she told Eddie Willers that she would run the railroad when they grew up. She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought—and never worried about it again."

"There is no necessity for pain—why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity?—we who hold the love and the secret of joy, to what punishment have we been sentenced for it, and by whom?"

"It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener."

"Man? What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur."

"I don't like people who speak or think in terms of gaining anybody's confidence. If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others, only their rational perception. The person who craves a moral blank check of that kind, has dishonest intentions, whether he admits it to himself or not."

"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."

"He saw for the first time that he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act. No, he thought, not an assurance of victory—who can ever have that?—only the chance to act, which is all one needs. Now he was contemplating, impersonally and for the first time, the real heart of terror: being delivered to destruction with one's hands tied behind one's back."

"As the tunnel came closer, they saw, at the edge of the sky far to the south, in a void of space and rock, a spot of living fire twisting in the wind. They did not know what it was and did not care to learn. ... As the train went into the tunnel, the flame of Wyatt's Torch was the last thing they saw on earth."

"She thought: To find a feeling that would hold, as their sum, as their final expression, the purpose of all the things she loved on earth . . . To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his . . . No, not Francisco d'Anconia, not Hank Rearden, not any man she had ever met or admired . . . A man who existed only in her knowledge of her capacity for an emotion she had never felt, but would have given her life to experience."

"Inasmuch as the formula of Rearden Metal is my own personal secret, and in view of the fact that the Metal costs much less to produce than you boys can imagine, I expect to skin the public to the tune of a profit of twenty-five per cent in the next few years." "What do you mean, skin the public, Mr. Rearden?" asked the boy. "If it's true, as I've read in your ads, that your Metal will last three times longer than any other and at half the price, wouldn't the public be getting a bargain?" "Oh, have you noticed that?"

"Wasn't it evil to wish without moving—or to move without aim?"

"Do you know what that banquet was like? It's as if they'd heard that there are values one is supposed to honor and this is what one does to honor them—so they went through the motions, like ghosts pulled by some sort of distant echoes from a better age. I . . . I couldn't stand it."

"Don't ever get angry at a man for stating the truth."

"I am leaving it as I found it. Take over. It's yours."

"You see, Dr. Stadler, people don't want to think. And the deeper they get into trouble, the less they want to think. But by some sort of instinct, they feel that they ought to and it makes them feel guilty. So they'll bless and follow anyone who gives them a justification for not thinking. Anyone who makes a virtue—a highly intellectual virtue—out of what they know to be their sin, their weakness and their guilt."

"Miss Taggart, do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own—they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal— for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them—while you'd give a year of your life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them. They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors. They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear."

"Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?"

"I'd take no pride in any hopeless longing. I wouldn't hold a stillborn aspiration. I'd want to have it, to make it, to live it."

"There was a time when men were afraid that somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to their fellows. Nowadays, they're afraid that somebody will name what everybody knows. Have you practical people ever thought that that's all it would take to blast your whole, big, complex structure, with all your laws and guns—just somebody naming the exact nature of what it is you're doing?"

"So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?"

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth."

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made—before it can be looted or mooched—made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced."

"Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?"

"Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires."