All 6 Uses of
rectitude
in
Atlas Shrugged
- She wanted to wrest from him an acknowledgment of his moral depravity-but only his own moral rectitude could attach significance to such a verdict.†
Chpt 2.4 *
- She did not know that the thing which seemed so violent, yet felt like such a still, unfamiliar calm within her, was the power of full certainty-and that the anger shaking her body, the anger which made her ready, with the same passionate indifference, either to kill or to die, was her love of rectitude, the only love to which all the years of her life had been given.†
Chpt 2.6
- Your unrequited rectitude is the only hold they have upon you.†
Chpt 2.8
- Her line of attack, which he had found so baffling, had been constant and clear-it was his self-esteem she had sought to destroy, knowing that a man who surrenders his value is at the mercy of anyone's will; it was his moral purity she had struggled to breach, it was his confident rectitude she had wanted to shatter by means of the poison of guilt-as if, were he to collapse, his depravity would give her a right to hers.†
Chpt 3.6
- "You blank it out and cling to your hypocrisy of 'faith' in order to blank out the knowledge that the looters have a stranglehold upon you, which consists of your moral code-that the looters are the final and consistent practitioners of the morality you're half-obeying, half-evadingthat they practice it the only way it can be practiced: by turning the earth into a sacrificial furnace-that your morality forbids you to oppose them in the only way they can be opposed: by refusing to become a sacrificial animal and proudly asserting your right to exist-that in order to fight them to the finish and with full rectitude, it is your morality that you have to reject, "You blank it out, because your s†
Chpt 3.7
- Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.†
Chpt 3.7
Definitions:
-
(1)
(rectitude) moral integrity
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
More rarely, rectitude can reference correctness of judgment. or procedure.