All 11 Uses of
profess
in
Atlas Shrugged
- They professed to love him for some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which he could wish to be loved.†
Chpt 1.2 *
- Nobody professed to understand the question of the frozen railroad bonds; perhaps, because everybody understood it too well.†
Chpt 2.1
- Let a man corrupt his values and his view of existence, let him profess that love is not self-enjoyment but self-denial, that virtue consists, not of pride, but of pity or pain or weakness or sacrifice, that the noblest love is born, not of admiration, but of charity, not in response to values, but in response to flaws-and he will have cut himself in two.†
Chpt 2.4
- His body will not obey him, it will not respond, it will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw him to the lowest type of whore he can find.†
Chpt 2.4
- You've always professed your admiration for me.†
Chpt 2.4
- There is no form of enjoyment that we seek from their world, and-this was hardest for us to attain-what we now feel for their world is that emotion which they preach as an ideal: indifference-the blank-the zero-the mark of death…… We are giving men everything they've professed to want and to seek as virtue for centuries.†
Chpt 3.1
- A morality that professes the belief that the values of the spirit are more precious than matter, a morality that teaches you to scorn a whore who gives her body indiscriminately to all men-this same morality demands that you surrender your soul to promiscuous love for all comers.†
Chpt 3.7
- No matter whose welfare he professes to serve, be it the welfare of God or of that disembodied gargoyle he describes as 'The People,' no matter what ideal he proclaims in terms of some supernatural dimension-in fact, in reality, on earth, his ideal is death, his craving is to kill, his only satisfaction is to torture.†
Chpt 3.7
- Destruction is the only end that the mystics' creed has ever achieved, as it is the only end that you see them achieving today, and if the ravages wrought by their acts have not made them question their doctrines, if they profess to be moved by love, yet are not deterred by piles of human corpses, it is because the truth about their souls is worse than the obscene excuse you have allowed them, the excuse that the end justifies the means and that the horrors they practice are means to…†
Chpt 3.7
- Since childhood, you have been hiding the guilty secret that you feel no desire to be moral, no desire to seek self-immolation, that you dread and hate your code, but dare not say it even to yourself, that you're devoid of those moral 'instincts' which others profess to feel.†
Chpt 3.7
- …and the guiltiest among you are the men who had the capacity to know, yet chose to blank out reality, the men who were willing to sell their intelligence into cynical servitude to force: the contemptible breed of those mystics of science who profess a devotion to some sort of 'pure knowledge' the purity consisting of their claim that such knowledge has no practical purpose on this earth-who reserve their logic for inanimate matter, but believe that the subject of dealing with men…†
Chpt 3.7
Definition:
-
(profess) to claim (openly state) -- sometimes insincerely