All 18 Uses of

ultimate
in
Atlas Shrugged

Isn't that your ultimate argument against me?†
Chpt 2.1

ultimate = most extreme as in final, best, worst, most important, or most fundamental

No matter how hard a struggle he had lived through in the past, he had never reached the ultimate ugliness of abandoning the will to act.†
Chpt 2.1

This last was stated without explanation or elaboration, as if the words "profit motive" were the self-evident brand of ultimate evil.†
Chpt 2.4

His body will always follow the ultimate logic of his deepest convictions; if he believes that flaws are values, he has damned existence as evil and only the evil will attract him.†
Chpt 2.4

Love is the ultimate form of recognition one grants to superlative values.†
Chpt 3.1

It was the ultimate form of our admiration for each other, with full knowledge of the values by which we made our choice.†
Chpt 3.3 *

Were I to surrender to pain and give up in futile regret that my own error has wrecked my past-that would be the act of final treason, the ultimate failure toward that truth I regret having failed.†
Chpt 3.3

There, she thought, was the ultimate goal of all that loose academic prattle which businessmen had ignored for years, the goal of all the slipshod definitions, the sloppy generalities, the soupy abstractions, all claiming that obedience to objective reality is the same as obedience to the State, that there is no difference between a law of nature and a bureaucrat's directive, that a hungry man is not free, that man must be released from the tyranny of food, shelter and clothing-all of it, for years, that the day might come when Nat Taggart, the realist, would be asked to consider the will of Cuffy Meigs as a fact of nature, irrevocable and absolute like steel, rails and gravitation, to accep†
Chpt 3.5

You've never suffered, the dead stare of the eyes was saying, you've never felt anything, because only to suffer is to feel-there's no such thing as joy, there's only pain and the absence of pain, only pain and the zero, when one feels nothing-I suffer, I'm twisted by suffering, I'm made of undiluted suffering, that's my purity, that's my virtue-and yours, you the untwisted one, you the uncomplaining, yours is to relieve me of my pain-cut your unsuffering body to patch up mine, cut your unfeeling soul to stop mine from feeling-and we'll achieve the ultimate ideal, the triumph over life, the zero!†
Chpt 3.5

She started rapidly down the street, forgetting what she wore, wondering why the touch of the wind seemed too cold and too ultimately close.†
Chpt 3.5

ultimately = finally; or in the end

And to forestall any inquiry into the cause of the difference between a jungle village and New York City, they resort to the ultimate obscenity of explaining man's industrial progress-skyscrapers, cable bridges, power motors, railroad trains-by declaring that man is an animal who possesses an 'instinct of tool-making.'†
Chpt 3.7

ultimate = most extreme as in final, best, worst, most important, or most fundamental

Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence, working for less than their barest survival, leaving nothing but scraps for their rulers to loot, refusing to think, to venture, to produce, when the ultimate collector of their profits and the final authority on truth or error was the whim of some gilded degenerate sanctioned as superior to reason by divine right and by grace of a club.†
Chpt 3.7

To escape it-if he's chosen an irrational standard-he will fake, evade, blank out; he will cheat himself of reality, of existence, of happiness, of mind; and he will ultimately cheat himself of self-esteem by struggling to preserve its illusion rather than to risk discovering its lack.†
Chpt 3.7

ultimately = finally; or in the end

Material products can't be shared, they belong to some ultimate consumer; it is only the value of an idea that can be shared with unlimited numbers of men, making all sharers richer at no one's sacrifice or loss, raising the productive capacity of whatever labor they perform.†
Chpt 3.7

ultimate = most extreme as in final, best, worst, most important, or most fundamental

suddenly leaned against the wall, trembling with terror, preferring not to know-then the moment when she felt the movement of her foot coming to rest on the first of the steps-then a single, unbroken progression of lightness, of rising without effort or doubt or fear, of feeling the twisting installments of stairway dropping down beneath her unhesitant feet, as if the momentum of her irresistible rise were coming from the straightness of her body, the poise of her shoulders, the lift of her head and the solemnly exultant certainty that in the moment of ultimate decision, it was not disaster she expected of her life, at the end of a rising stairway she had needed thirty-seven years to climb.†
Chpt 3.8

These people-she thought-knew, not by means of their reason, but by means of their panic, that this banquet was the ultimate climax and the naked essence of their world.†
Chpt 3.8

But when the place that had once been the source of the tide-New York City-rose in the distance before them, it was still extending its lights to the sky, still defying the primordial darkness, almost as if, in an ultimate effort, in a final appeal for help, it were now stretching its arms to the plane that was crossing its sky.†
Chpt 3.10

Definition:

most extreme as in final, best, worst, most important, or most fundamental

The exact meaning of ultimate depends upon its context. For example: