All 14 Uses of
chaos
in
Atlas Shrugged
- If music was emotion and emotion came from thought, then this was the scream of chaos, of the irrational, of the helpless, of man's self-abdication.†
Chpt 1.4 *
- It is not a matter of calculable trends, but a chaos subject to the rule of the moment, in which anything is possible.†
Chpt 1.7
- I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child's brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he's unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror.†
Chpt 3.2
- If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence-by his own choice.†
Chpt 3.2
- Now, watching the scene around him, watching Dr. Ferris' vague, excited, loosely casual gestures in the midst of a group of newsmen, he had an impression of bewildering confusion, of senseless, chaotic inefficiency-and of a smooth machine working to produce the exact degree of that impression needed at the exact moment.†
Chpt 3.3
- "Yes, Jim, of course," she answered, wondering what instinct in what impossible kind of chaos had made her say it as if it were her part to reassure him.†
Chpt 3.4
- She spoke in a flat monotone, as if reciting her thoughts to herself, intent upon giving the solid identity of words to the torturous shreds of chaos twisting in her mind.†
Chpt 3.4
- She was seeing-in the chaos of a perishing continent —the precise, mathematical execution of all the ideas men had held.†
Chpt 3.5
- …their secession from the country, went on to the final extreme of the very evil that had destroyed them, as if fighting murder with suicide: went on to seize all property within their reach, to declare community bondage of all to all, and to perish within a week, their meager loot consumed, in the bloody hatred of all for all, in the chaos of no rule save that of the gun, to perish under the lethargic thrust of a few worn soldiers sent out from Washington to bring order to the ruins.†
Chpt 3.7
- If, in the chaos of the motives that have made you listen to the radio tonight, there was an honest, rational desire to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man whom I wished to address.†
Chpt 3.7
- When the looters' state collapses, deprived of the best of its slaves, when it falls to a level of impotent chaos, like the mystic-ridden nations of the Orient, and dissolves into starving robber gangs fighting to rob one another-when the advocates of the morality of sacrifice perish with their final ideal-then and on that day we will return.†
Chpt 3.7
- No one had been able to untangle the issues in the violent chaos of the next few days-the issues had never been named, the sides had remained unacknowledged, but everyone had known that the bloody encounters between the older workers and the newer had not been driven to such ferocious intensity by the trivial causes that kept setting them off-neither guards nor policemen nor state troopers had been able to keep order for the length of a day-nor could any faction muster a candidate…†
Chpt 3.8
- These chips had been the only compass directing his course through four days and nights-while he drove down deserted highways, across a country collapsing into chaos, while he developed a monomaniac's cunning for obtaining illegal purchases of gas, while he snatched random hours of restless sleep, in obscure motels, under assumed names…… I'm Robert Stadler-he had thought, his mind repeating it as a formula of omnipotence…… To seize control-he had thought, speeding against the futile…†
Chpt 3.9
- He could not tell what the past few days had cost him or what he had done to save the San Francisco terminal from the blind chaos of a civil war that men were fighting with no concept of their goals; there was no way to remember the deals he had made on the basis of the range of every shifting moment.†
Chpt 3.10
Definition:
-
(chaos) a state of extreme confusion and disorder