All 36 Uses of
objective
in
Atlas Shrugged
- It seems to me that the national policy ought to be aimed at the objective of giving everybody a chance at his fair share of iron ore, with a view toward the preservation of the industry as a whole.†
Chpt 1.3
- Judging by every objective fact, the Rio Norte Line is to be the best railroad in the country.†
Chpt 1.7
- "There are no objective facts," he had said.†
Chpt 1.8
- My objective was social progress, universal prosperity, human brotherhood and love.†
Chpt 1.10
- This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values.†
Chpt 2.2
- Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced.†
Chpt 2.2
- But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted-and you create a nation of law-breakers-and then you cash in on guilt.†
Chpt 2.3
- A prisoner brought to trial can defend himself only if there is an objective principle of justice recognized by his judges, a principle upholding his rights, which they may not violate and which he can invoke.†
Chpt 2.4
- But the man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises-because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him.†
Chpt 2.4
- Therefore, our sole objective must now be to hold the line.†
Chpt 2.6
- Gold is the objective value, the means of preserving one's wealth and one's future.†
Chpt 2.7
- We accept nothing but objective values.†
Chpt 3.1
- I am writing a treatise on the philosophy of law, I shall demonstrate that humanity's darkest evil, the most destructive horror machine among all the devices of men, is non-objective law…… No, Miss Taggart, my treatise will not be published outside.†
Chpt 3.1
- Litigants obey the verdict of a tribunal solely on the premise that there is an objective rule of conduct, which they both accept.†
Chpt 3.1
- There, she thought, was the ultimate goal of all that loose academic prattle which businessmen had ignored for years, the goal of all the slipshod definitions, the sloppy generalities, the soupy abstractions, all claiming that obedience to objective reality is the same as obedience to the State, that there is no difference between a law of nature and a bureaucrat's directive, that a hungry man is not free, that man must be released from the tyranny of food, shelter and clothing-all of…†
Chpt 3.5
- …between a law of nature and a bureaucrat's directive, that a hungry man is not free, that man must be released from the tyranny of food, shelter and clothing-all of it, for years, that the day might come when Nat Taggart, the realist, would be asked to consider the will of Cuffy Meigs as a fact of nature, irrevocable and absolute like steel, rails and gravitation, to accept the Meigs made world as an objective, unchangeable reality-then to continue producing abundance in that world.†
Chpt 3.5
- There was the goal of all those con men of library and classroom, who sold their revelations as reason, their "instincts" as science, their cravings as knowledge, the goal of all the savages of the non-objective, the non-absolute, the relative, the tentative, the probable-the savages who, seeing a farmer gather a harvest, can consider it only as a mystic phenomenon unbound by the law of causality and created by the farmer's omnipotent whim, who then proceed to seize the farmer, to…†
Chpt 3.5
- He had paid them to do it-he whom the law permitted no other way to gain his freedom, no right to state the facts and plead the truth-the law which delivered his fate, not to objective rules objectively defined, but to the arbitrary mercy of a judge with a wizened face and a look of empty cunning.†
Chpt 3.5
- He had paid them to do it-he whom the law permitted no other way to gain his freedom, no right to state the facts and plead the truth-the law which delivered his fate, not to objective rules objectively defined, but to the arbitrary mercy of a judge with a wizened face and a look of empty cunning.†
Chpt 3.5
- They acted like savages performing a ritual devised to set them free of objective reality.†
Chpt 3.5
- With this objective in view, our Plan is …. our Plan is ….†
Chpt 3.6
- A year ago, he thought, they would have shot him; two years ago, they would have confiscated his property; generations ago, men of their kind had been able to afford the luxury of murder and expropriation, the safety of pretending to themselves and their victims that material loot was their only objective.†
Chpt 3.6
- Your code-which boasts that it upholds eternal, absolute, objective moral values and scorns the conditional, the relative and the subjective —your code hands out, as its version of the absolute, the following rule of moral conduct: If you wish it, it's evil; if others wish it, it's good; if the motive of your action is your welfare, don't do it; if the motive is the welfare of others, then anything goes.†
Chpt 3.7
- Their purpose is to deprive you of the concept on which man's mind, his life and his culture depend: the concept of an objective reality.†
Chpt 3.7
- If you wonder by what means they propose to do it, walk into any college classroom and you will hear your professors teaching your children that man can be certain of nothing, that his consciousness has no validity whatever, that he can learn no facts and no laws of existence, that he's incapable of knowing an objective reality.†
Chpt 3.7
- …belief that it can be produced by a rabbit's foot kissed under a stepladder on the first of the moon-truth is whatever people want it to be, and people are everyone except yourself; reality is whatever people choose to say it is, there are no objective facts, there are only people's arbitrary wishes-a man who seeks knowledge in a laboratory by means of test tubes and logic is an old-fashioned, superstitious fool; a true scientist is a man who goes around taking public polls-and if it…†
Chpt 3.7
- If you surrender your power to perceive, if you accept the switch of your standard from the objective to the collective and wait for mankind to tell you what to think, you will find another switch taking place before the eyes you have renounced: you will find that your teachers become the rulers of the collective, and if you then refuse to obey them, protesting that they are not the whole of mankind, they will answer: 'By what means do you know that we are not?†
Chpt 3.7
- His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and rests on the absolute of an objective reality.†
Chpt 3.7
- The grim joke is on you: that need of self-esteem, which you're unable to explain or to define, belongs to my morality, not yours; it's the objective token of my code, it is my proof within your own soul.†
Chpt 3.7
- 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 or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.†
Chpt 3.7
- We do not live or work with any form of the non-objective.†
Chpt 3.7
- So long as men, in the era of savagery, had no concept of objective reality and believed that physical nature was ruled by the whim of unknowable demons-no thought, no science, no production were possible.†
Chpt 3.7
- We required that you leave us free to function-free to think and to work as we choose-free to take our own risks and to bear our own lossesfree to earn our own profits and to make our own fortunes-free to gamble on your rationality, to submit our products to your judgment for the purpose of a voluntary trade, to rely on the objective value of our work and on your mind's ability to see it-free to count on your intelligence and honesty, and to deal with nothing but your mind.†
Chpt 3.7
- You will live in a world of responsible beings, who will be as consistent and reliable as facts; the guarantee of their character will be a system of existence where objective reality is the standard and the judge.†
Chpt 3.7
- Our objective is only to assist you to assume your rightful place in society, Mr. Galt.†
Chpt 3.8
- This was the stamp James Taggart had dreaded, from which there was no escape: the stamp and proof of objectivity.
Chpt 3.9 *objectivity = a reality based on facts without the influence of personal feelings or preferences