All 12 Uses of
omnipotent
in
Atlas Shrugged
- He saw for the first time that he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.†
Chpt 1.7 *
- So many men seeking favors had been afraid of him that he now acted as if his anger were a solution to everything, as if his anger were omnipotent, as if all he had to do was to get angry.†
Chpt 2.6
- They never spoke of what they wished they might do in the future, they never wondered whether some mysterious omnipotence had favored them with some unknowable talent to achieve the things they wantedthey spoke of what they would do.†
Chpt 3.2
- …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 chain him, to deprive him of tools, of seeds, of water, of soil, to push him out on a barren rock and to command: "Now grow a harvest and feed us!"†
Chpt 3.5
- They want an omnipotent power over existence; instead, they lose the power of their consciousness.†
Chpt 3.7
- He believes that nature is ruled by demons who possess an omnipotent power and that reality is their fluid plaything, where they can turn his bowl of meal into a snake and his wife into a beetle at any moment, where the A he has never discovered can be any non-A they choose, where the only knowledge he possesses is that he must not attempt to know.†
Chpt 3.7
- …on the mud floors of their hovels, in terror that the devil might steal the soup they had worked eighteen hours to earn-to the seedy little smiling professor who assures you that your brain has no capacity to think, that you have no means of perception and must blindly obey the omnipotent will of that supernatural force: Society-all of it is the same performance for the same and only purpose: to reduce you to the kind of pulp that has surrendered the validity of its consciousness.†
Chpt 3.7
- The supernatural power that a mystic dreads, the unknowable spirit he worships, the consciousness he considers omnipotent is-yours.†
Chpt 3.7
- A mystic is driven by the urge to impress, to cheat, to flatter, to deceive, to force that omnipotent consciousness of others.†
Chpt 3.7
- You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you're incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others-that you're unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler-that you're unable to earn your living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no…†
Chpt 3.7
- Only a brute, a fool or an evader can agree to exist on such terms or agree to give his fellow men a blank check on his life and his mind, to accept the belief that others have the right to dispose of his person at their whim, that the will of the majority is omnipotent, that the physical force of muscles and numbers is a substitute for justice, reality and truth.†
Chpt 3.7
- …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 traffic lights of half-abandoned towns-speeding on the vibrating steel of the Taggart Bridge across the Mississippispeeding past the occasional ruins of farms in the empty…†
Chpt 3.9
Definition:
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(omnipotent) all powerfuleditor's notes: note: "omni" means "all". It is often said that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent (all powerful, all knowing, and all present; i.e., present everywhere)