Atlas Shrugged Movie Quotes

We understand this well in every other book, movie, or television show—perhaps a little too well. Today’s filmmakers blow up entire populated planets just to raise the stakes for the hero’s climactic fight scene (something done in both the Star Wars and Star Trek science fiction franchises). In “Game of Thrones,” murder and torture are doled out with such abandon, over so many seasons, that they cease to be mere plot devices and become a central theme of the series. But heaven forbid Ayn Rand should write a scene where people suffocate to death to demonstrate the disastrous consequences of Big Government. As with most literary complaints against her, this one is applied selectively, only to the author with an unwelcome political and philosophical message.

Dr. Stadler felt certain that this small-time shyster had had as little to do with the Project as any of the movie-usher attendants, that he possessed neither the mind nor the initiative nor even the sufficient degree of malice to cause a new gopher trap to be brought into the world, that he, too, was only the pawn of a silent machine—a machine that had no center, no leader, no direction, a machine that had not been set in motion by Dr. Ferris or Wesley Mouch, or any of the cowed creatures in the grandstands, or any of the creatures behind the scenes—an impersonal, unthinking, unembodied machine, of which none was the driver and all were the pawns, each to the degree of his evil. Dr. Stadler gripped the edge of the bench: he felt a desire to leap to his feet and run.

...a tall, fragile woman with pale blond hair and a face of such beauty that it seemed veiled by distance, as if the artist had been merely able to suggest it, not to make it quite real...she was Kay Ludlow, the movie star who, once seen, could never be forgotten; the star who had retired and vanished five years ago, to be replaced by girls of indistinguishable names and interchangeable faces...she felt that the glass cafeteria was a cleaner use for Kay Ludlow’s beauty than a role in a picture glorifying the commonplace for possessing no glory.

Isn’t it odd? When a politician or a movie star retires, we read front page stories about it. But when a philosopher retires, people do not even notice it.” “They do, eventually.

You know, Mr. Rearden,” he said in the tone of a discovery which he could not quite bring himself to believe, “I think there’s something phony about the way Mr. Boyle runs his business. I can’t understand what he’s after. They’ve got half their furnaces idle, but last month there were all those big stories about Associated Steel in all the newspapers. About their output? Why, no—about the wonderful housing project that Mr. Boyle’s just built for his workers. Last week, it was colored movies that Mr. Boyle sent to all the high schools, showing how steel is made and what great service it performs for everybody. Now Mr. Boyle’s got a radio program, they give talks about the importance of the steel industry to the country and they keep saying that we must preserve the steel industry as a whole. I don’t understand what he means by ‘as a whole.

The nation which had once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor,” said Francisco d’Anconia in a press interview. But this was not printed. The only business boom, that winter, came to the amusement industry. People wrenched their pennies out of the quicksands of their food and heat budgets, and went without meals in order to crowd into movie theaters, in order to escape for a few hours the state of animals reduced to the single concern of terror over their crudest needs. In January, all movie theaters, night clubs and bowling alleys were closed by order of Wesley Mouch, for the purpose of conserving fuel. “Pleasure is not an essential of existence,” wrote Bertram Scudder.