41 uses
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Definition
obtain (come into the possession of something)
- You don't know how this Mark Yonts happened to acquire the factory?1.10 Part 1 Chapter 10 — Wyatt's Torch (4% in)
- She was looking up at him, her glance acquiring some special quality of feminine appeal by being sent from under her lowered forehead up toward his full height; she asked, a little too casually and too cautiously, "The date I had in mind was December tenth, but would you prefer the ninth or the eleventh?"1.2 Part 1 Chapter 2 — The Chain (55% in)
- She glanced at him slyly, and her voice acquired a livelier note when she drawled, "Jock Benson said that you have a soft snap on that railroad anyway, because it's your sister who runs the whole works.1.4 Part 1 Chapter 4 — The Immovable Movers (32% in)
- He acquired his first title of property, with the aid of some inaccuracy about his age, on the day when he received his university diploma, and he sent them both to his father.1.5 Part 1 Chapter 5 — The Climax of the D'Anconias (58% in)
- The plea of his first smile had not been a plea of weakness; he had acquired an air of determination that seemed merciless.1.5 Part 1 Chapter 5 — The Climax of the D'Anconias (65% in)
- Having dealt with the clean reality of metals, technology, production all his life, he had acquired the conviction that one had to concern oneself with the rational, not the insane-that one had to seek that which was right, because the right answer always won-that the senseless, the wrong, the monstrously unjust could not work, could not succeed, could do nothing but defeat itself.1.6 Part 1 Chapter 6 — The Non-Commercial (11% in)
- Her eyes had the look, acquired in open country, of being set for great distances.1.8 Part 1 Chapter 8 — The John Galt Line (37% in)
- He paced the room sullenly, knowing that her eyes followed him, enjoying the knowledge, enjoying the sense of tremendous significance which his movements, his cuff links, his shoelaces, his lampshades and ashtrays acquired in that gentle, unquestioning glance.1.9 Part 1 Chapter 9 — The Sacred and the Profane (25% in)
- How did you happen to acquire it?1.10 Part 1 Chapter 10 — Wyatt's Torch (51% in)
- You won't like having to see them, Miss Taggart," said the chief of police of Durance, Louisiana; he was an elderly man with a slow, firm manner and a look of bitterness acquired not in blind resentment.1.10 Part 1 Chapter 10 — Wyatt's Torch (66% in)
- Those men who do not mind being practical enough to sell their brains for money, ought to acquire a little knowledge of the conditions of practical reality.2.1 Part 2 Chapter 1 — The Man Who Belonged on Earth (46% in)
- He kept describing circles around Taggart, as if trying to acquire a suntan by means of an occasional ray, his wistful smile pleading to be noticed.2.2 Part 2 Chapter 2 — The Aristocracy of Pull (35% in)
- His face looked tanned by a summer sun, and his eyes were the exact color of the sky on the kind of day when he had acquired his tan.2.2 Part 2 Chapter 2 — The Aristocracy of Pull (59% in)
- So he tries, by going through the motions of the effect, to acquire that which should have been the cause.2.4 Part 2 Chapter 4 — The Sanction of the Victim (89% in)
- But she saw lights in the windows of the cheap, garish structures that had acquired, within a few years, the slovenly dilapidation of slum hovels; the homes of people who had not moved, the people who never looked beyond the span of one week.2.5 Part 2 Chapter 5 — Account Overdrawn (66% in)
- The man in Bedroom H, Car No. 5, was a businessman who had acquired his business, an ore mine, with the help of a government loan, under the Equalization of Opportunity Bill.2.7 Part 2 Chapter 7 — The Moratorium on Brains (97% in)
- But the work of building a path was a living sum, so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow.2.8 Part 2 Chapter 8 — By Our Love (5% in)
- It was the only country in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only country whose money was the symbol of man's right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself.2.10 Part 2 Chapter 10 — The Sign of the Dollar (70% in)
- She learned that she had torn the cartilage of two ribs, that she had sprained an ankle, ripped patches of skin off one knee and one elbow, and acquired a few bruises spread in purple blotches over her body.3.1 Part 3 Chapter 1 — Atlantis (19% in)
- Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill?3.1 Part 3 Chapter 1 — Atlantis (85% in)
- No matter what he knew about her, she thought, the only knowledge that could explain this, was a knowledge he had had no way of acquiring.3.2 Part 3 Chapter 2 — The Utopia of Greed (7% in)
- She left the few possessions she had acquired-her peasant skirt, a blouse, an apron, a few pieces of underwear-folded neatly in a drawer of the chest in her room.3.2 Part 3 Chapter 2 — The Utopia of Greed (97% in)
- Jim's face looked like a crumpled piece of paper, though its soft, puffed flesh had acquired no additional lines.3.3 Part 3 Chapter 3 — Anti-Greed (47% in)
- They acted as if they hoped to gain, from the objects of gracious luxury, the power and the honor of which those objects had once been the product and symbol-they acted, she thought, like those savages who devour the corpse of an adversary in the hope of acquiring his strength and his virtue.3.5 Part 3 Chapter 5 — Their Brothers' Keepers (67% in)
- Then she was conscious of nothing but the sensations of her body, because her body acquired the sudden power to let her know her most complex values by direct perception.3.5 Part 3 Chapter 5 — Their Brothers' Keepers (89% in)
- Who had chosen to give its present tenants the means to acquire this room?3.6 Part 3 Chapter 6 — The Concerto of Deliverance (56% in)
- Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two-existence and consciousness-are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end.3.7 Part 3 Chapter 7 — "This is John Galt Speaking" (22% in)
- No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own mind that has to acquire it.3.7 Part 3 Chapter 7 — "This is John Galt Speaking" (23% in)
- Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live-that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values-that all work is creative work ft done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in...3.7 Part 3 Chapter 7 — "This is John Galt Speaking" (28% in)
- ...is the creation of your own character-that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind-that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining-that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul-that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic...3.7 Part 3 Chapter 7 — "This is John Galt Speaking" (29% in)
- What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection?3.7 Part 3 Chapter 7 — "This is John Galt Speaking" (36% in)
- Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge-he acquired a mind and became a rational being.3.7 Part 3 Chapter 7 — "This is John Galt Speaking" (36% in)
- He was sentenced to experience desire-he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment.3.7 Part 3 Chapter 7 — "This is John Galt Speaking" (36% in)
- Whatever value you seek to acquire, be it wealth or food or love or rights, if you acquire it by means of your virtue, your code does not regard it as a moral acquisition: you occasion no loss to anyone, it is a trade, not alms; a payment, not a sacrifice.3.7 Part 3 Chapter 7 — "This is John Galt Speaking" (45% in)
- Whatever value you seek to acquire, be it wealth or food or love or rights, if you acquire it by means of your virtue, your code does not regard it as a moral acquisition: you occasion no loss to anyone, it is a trade, not alms; a payment, not a sacrifice.3.7 Part 3 Chapter 7 — "This is John Galt Speaking" (45% in)
- He has arrested his mind at the level of a baby's, at the stage when a consciousness acquires its initial sensory perceptions and has not learned to distinguish solid objects.3.7 Part 3 Chapter 7 — "This is John Galt Speaking" (58% in)
- Your consciousness, they tell you, consists of 'reflexes,' 'reactions,' 'experiences,' 'urges,' and 'drives' -and refuse to identify the means by which they acquired that knowledge, to identify the act they are performing when they tell it or the act you are performing when you listen.3.7 Part 3 Chapter 7 — "This is John Galt Speaking" (61% in)
- When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it's picked up by scoundrels-and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.3.7 Part 3 Chapter 7 — "This is John Galt Speaking" (78% in)
- In place of your dream of an omniscient automaton, accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory.3.7 Part 3 Chapter 7 — "This is John Galt Speaking" (84% in)
- In place of your dream of an omniscient automaton, accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory.3.7 Part 3 Chapter 7 — "This is John Galt Speaking" (84% in)
- No child is afraid of nature; it is your fear of men that will vanish, the fear that has stunted your soul, the fear you acquired in your early encounters with the incomprehensible, the unpredictable, the contradictory, the arbitrary, the hidden, the faked, the irrational in men.3.7 Part 3 Chapter 7 — "This is John Galt Speaking" (98% in)
There are no more uses of "acquire" in Atlas Shrugged.
Typical Usage
(best examples)