All 28 Uses of
extortion
in
Atlas Shrugged
- "They're setting up stooges whom they control, to run the properties extorted from them.†
Chpt 1.8
- I want you to look at me whenever you hear of some act of depravity, or feel anger at human corruption, or feel contempt for someone's knavery, or are the victim of a new governmental extortion-to look and to know that you're no better, that you're superior to no one, that there's nothing you have the right to condemn.†
Chpt 2.3
- She wanted to punish him for the pain he had caused her and she held her pain as a gun aimed at him, as if she wished to extort his agony at the point of his pity.†
Chpt 2.4 *
- To count upon his virtue and use it as an instrument of torture, to practice blackmail with the victim's generosity as sole means of extortion, to accept the gift of a man's good will and turn it into a tool for the giver's destruction …. he sat very still, contemplating the formula of so monstrous an evil that he was able to name it, but not to believe it possible.†
Chpt 2.4
- …drained in forced labor, by means of their ability to feed their masters, by means of the hostage system, of their love for their children or wives or friends-by means of love, ability and pleasure as the fodder for threats and the bait for extortion, with love tied to fear, ability to punishment, ambition to confiscation, with blackmail as law, with escape from pain, not quest for pleasure, as the only incentive to effort and the only reward of achievement-men held enslaved by means…†
Chpt 2.6
- They say that Orren Boyle seems to have known about that directive long ago, weeks or months in advance, because he had started, quietly and secretly, to reconstruct his furnaces for the production of Rearden Metal, in one of his lesser steel plants, an obscure little place way out on the coast of Maine, He was ready to start pouring the Metal the moment Rearden's extortion paper-I mean, Gift Certificate-was signed.†
Chpt 2.7
- I cannot compute all the money that has been extorted from you-in hidden taxes, in regulations, in wasted time, in lost effort, in energy spent to overcome artificial obstacles.†
Chpt 2.7
- I divide the money among my clients in proportion to the sums extorted from them.†
Chpt 2.7
- …an abyss to be filled by the bodies of its betters-I saw them seeking, just as they seek to feed on Mulligan's money, to feed on those hours when I wrote my music and on that which made me write it, seeking to gnaw their way to self-esteem by extorting from me the admission that they were the goal of my music, so that precisely by reason of my achievement, it would not be they who'd acknowledge my value, but I who would bow to theirs…… It was that night that I took the oath never to…†
Chpt 3.1
- Your account, however, is not as large as some of the others, even though huge sums were extorted from you by force in the past twelve years.†
Chpt 3.2
- With an awed contempt-awed by the enormity of the sight-she wondered what inner degradation those men had to reach in order to arrive at a level of self-deception where they would seek the extorted approval of an unwilling victim as the moral sanction they needed, they who thought that they were merely deceiving the world.†
Chpt 3.3
- He was accustomed to hearing speeches extorted by unknown pressure from unwilling victims, and he concluded that this was the case of a reactionary forced to confess a scandal and that, therefore, the speech had, perhaps, some political value; besides, he was curious to hear it "I am proud that he had chosen me to give him pleasure and that it was he who had been my choice.†
Chpt 3.3
- 1 accepted their insults, their frauds, their extortions.†
Chpt 3.3
- About a government that works by blackmail and extortion?†
Chpt 3.4
- And yet-he thought —through all the generations of political extortion, it was not the looting bureaucrats who had taken the blame, but the chained industrialists, not the men who peddled legal favors, but the men who were forced to buy them; and through all those generations of crusades against corruption, the remedy had always been, not the liberating of the victims, but the granting of wider powers for extortion to the extortionists.†
Chpt 3.5
- And yet-he thought —through all the generations of political extortion, it was not the looting bureaucrats who had taken the blame, but the chained industrialists, not the men who peddled legal favors, but the men who were forced to buy them; and through all those generations of crusades against corruption, the remedy had always been, not the liberating of the victims, but the granting of wider powers for extortion to the extortionists.†
Chpt 3.5
- And yet-he thought —through all the generations of political extortion, it was not the looting bureaucrats who had taken the blame, but the chained industrialists, not the men who peddled legal favors, but the men who were forced to buy them; and through all those generations of crusades against corruption, the remedy had always been, not the liberating of the victims, but the granting of wider powers for extortion to the extortionists.†
Chpt 3.5
- He knew that the specific reason behind the Plan was Orren Boyle; he knew that the working of an intricate mechanism, operated by pull, threat, pressure, blackmail-a mechanism like an irrational adding machine run amuck and throwing up any chance sum at the whim of any moment-had happened to add up to Boyle's pressure upon these men to extort for him this last piece of plunder.†
Chpt 3.6
- From the first extortion he had accepted, from the first directive he had obeyed, he had given them cause to believe that reality was a thing to be cheated, that one could demand the irrational and someone somehow would provide it.†
Chpt 3.6
- He was seeing the progression of the years, the monstrous extortions, the impossible demands, the inexplicable victories of evil, the preposterous plans and unintelligible goals proclaimed in volumes of muddy philosophy, the desperate wonder of the victims who thought that some complex, malevolent wisdom was moving the powers destroying the world-and all of it had rested on one tenet behind the shifty eyes of the victors: he'll do something!†
Chpt 3.6
- Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from. us.†
Chpt 3.7
- 'They' are his only key to reality, he feels that he cannot exist save by harnessing their mysterious power and extorting their unaccountable consent, 'They' are his only means of perception and, like a blind man who depends on the sight of a dog, he feels he must leash them in order to live.†
Chpt 3.7
- …to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan-so throughout the world and throughout men's history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collectivized countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of…†
Chpt 3.7
- By extorting your acceptance of supernatural absolutes, it has forced you to reject the absolute of nature.†
Chpt 3.7
- You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value-you have now established an unselfish society where they trade extortion for extortion.†
Chpt 3.7
- You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value-you have now established an unselfish society where they trade extortion for extortion.†
Chpt 3.7
- Whatever they extort from people, they can extort it only through their victims' values — and they have no value of mine to hold over my head, nothing to threaten me with.†
Chpt 3.8
- Whatever they extort from people, they can extort it only through their victims' values — and they have no value of mine to hold over my head, nothing to threaten me with.†
Chpt 3.8
Definition:
-
(extortion) obtaining something by threat
or:
charging unfair prices of someone who has little choice