Favorite Quotes

He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it or dismiss it.

She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.

He, too, stood looking at her for a moment--and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning...

But this was that view of human destiny which she had most passionately hated and rejected: the view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve. Her life and her values could not bring her to that, she thought; she had never found beauty in longing for the impossible and had never found the possible to be beyond her reach.

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged includes elements of science fiction, mystery, and romance, and it contains Rand's most extensive statement of Objectivism in any of her works of fiction.

The theme of Atlas Shrugged, as Rand described it, is "the role of man's mind in existence".

The book explores a number of philosophical themes from which Rand would subsequently develop Objectivism.

In doing so, it expresses the advocacy of reason, individualism, and capitalism, and depicts what Rand saw to be the failures of governmental coercion.

Dagny Taggart, the operating vice-president of Taggart Transcontinental railroad, keeps the company going amid a sustained economic depression. ..

تاریخ نخستین خوانش

عنوان: ‏‫رهایی از بار گران (اطلس شانه انداخت)؛ نویسنده: آین رند‮‬؛ ‏‫مترجم: مينا شريفی‌ثابت؛ تهران، فرهنگ جاوید؛ 1399؛ در 1787ص؛ شابک9786227004175؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان روس تبار ایالات متحده آمریکا - سده 20م‮‬

داستان «اطلس شانه بالا انداخت (شانه باز زد یا اطلس شورید)»، رمانی اثر «آین رند (آلیسا زینوفیِونا روزنبام) روس تبار آمریکایی» است، که نخستین بار در سال 1957میلادی در «ایالات متحده آمریکا» منتشر شد، این کتاب چهارمین و آخرین رمان «آین رند»، و بلندترین اثر ایشان نیز هست، که در حوزه ی ادبیات داستانی، شاهکار ایشان دانسته شده؛ «اطلس شراگد» دارای عناصر علمی تخیلی، رازآمیز، و رمانتیک است، و مفصل‌ترین بیانیه ی هدفمند «آین رند» در بین همگی آثار داستانی ایشانست؛ در این داستان بسیاری از شهروندان، از پرداخت مالیات‌ها، و هزینه‌های مالی و فرهنگی روزافزون حکومت، سرباز می‌زنند، و مقررات سنگین دولتی را رد کرده، و از آن شانه خالی می‌کنند، و با دریغ کردن مهارت، استعدادها، و خلاقیت خویش، صنایع حیاتی کشور را نابود، و تعطیل می‌کنند؛ نویسنده در این نوشتار به ذهن خوانشگر می‌رساند که «اطلس اسطوره‌ ای» اگر از حمل، و بالا نگاه داشتن آسمان، سر باز می‌زد، چه رخ می‌داد؛ گویا «جان گالت (فیلسوف و مخترع خیالی کتاب)» است که آنان را رهبری می‌کند؛ «گالت» این محو شدن‌ها، و خود کنار کشیدنها را، «متوقف کردن موتور دنیا»، موتور پوینده و حیاتی دنیا، به وسیله ی خود حذفی، و عقب نشستن مردمانی توصیف می‌کند، که باید جامعه ی خویش را بارور کنند و به پیش برانند

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 19/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

After working on this book for several months, I finally finished it and loved it. I've learned that I rate a book highly when it forces me to think and broadens my perspective. Rand definitely accomplishes this in Atlas Shrugged and earns five stars. I am amazed at the depth of her philosophy, her intelligence, and her ability to write and communicate her ideas through strong, entertaining fictional characters.

In Atlas Shrugged, she shares her philosophy which she calls Objectivism, which in a word is a system of justice. Before reading this book, I always viewed justice as cold, distant, and inferior to mercy, but Rand helps me view the essentiality and virtues of justice. In a few other words, Rand is an advocate of reason, logic, accountability, production, capitalism, agency, human ability, and she believes that working for one's happiness is essential and each person's personal responsilibity. She is against pity, mediocrity, taxation, seizing wealth and production from those who produce to redistribute to those who are unwilling to work hard. In the story, she illustrates what would happen to the world if incentive to produce is removed from the intelligent and able - the motor of the world would stop.

I love how Rand's character Dagny Taggart is such an example of intelligence and ability. She will move heaven and earth to accomplish her purposes and she approaches life with such passion. She runs the leading transcontinental railroad in the country, and Rand created this character in the 1950's!

Despite my love of the book, there were a few drawbacks for me. Rand believes that one's professional work, what he is able to produce, is THE purpose of life, definitely a "live to work" approach. Also, I didn't find any thread of mercy in her philosophy, which makes me wonder her view on caring for those who cannot care for themselves. Rand also has a sexual theme that emerges several times in the book which I didn't know I was in for when I began the book. Be forewarned that it's there, and she has a strong theory on sexuality that you'll be exposed to in reading the book.

Reading Atlas Shrugged reminded and empowered me to work hard for what I want in life, to stop making excuses, and to hold myself accountable and responsible for what I do or don't acoomplish.

As a political jeremiad, cry de coeur, manifesto, Atlas is more prescient today than when it was written in '57. Its calls for the greatness of capitalism, the misguided attempts to sacrifice for others, and the victimization of those who achieve can't help but resonate with any astute follower of global trends.

As a philosophical examination of Man. Well it's meh. Read Aristotle or Socrates, Stoic vs Epicureans, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and one comes to the conclusion that no philosophy can encompass the complexities of life and to try to enunciate a system is unwise and hubristic.

As a Story, one that has characters, setting, and a plot, Atlas is a failure of Grand Guignol proportions - so bad one can't look away. The setting is some kind of retro-future, like steam punk say, but mixed with the anachronisms of railroad and radio reliance, while noting the spread of socialism across the globe. The characters are a manichean assemblage of Warriors and wussies. The heroes, perfect in body, mind, and soul - A Justice League of America made real, who never fart, or joke, whose every action is met with the grandest of proclamations on how something like holding a pen reveals the probity of their souls. The bad are worms without redeeming qualities who are sniveling weaklings whose only talent seems to be speaking in the cant of Orwell's 1984.
Finally the plot is too ridiculous, too contrived even to assault. Maybe the best example is when two people suddenly decide to take a drive across America, where they search out an abandoned factory, where they discover the unfinished super engine that will be a godsend to humanity. They are not engineers, but they can see what the machine will do, the machine isn't workable but it's tantalizingly close. Its origins just happen to answer the question of Who is John Galt?

Last thing, and Rand would appreciate this bc what I'm writing is so concrete. The book is almost 1200 pages long! That's okay, It's manageable, but what nearly broke me is the one chapter where a man gives a speech that stretches over 60 PAGES!That is just R O N G or is it just John Galt?

Want to see Rand's so-called philosophy in action? Just look at Bush, Cheney & Co., Enron, and the rest of that mess. Ayn Rand, in real life, was a person who lied, had affairs, and generally did whatever she felt like doing without regard to who got hurt as long as it wasn't her. In other words, a spoiled brat in an adult body, i.e. a sociopath. This "philosophy" is simply a rationalization of that behavior, a refusal to accept the responsibility for one another that is supposed to go with membership in the human race and an abdication from the social contract that makes civilization possible.
As other reviewers have noted, this simplistic and narcissistic perspective appeals to the immature and naive, but doesn't hold up well to real world experience, and by the time we're in our mid-to-late 20s, if not earlier, most of us have had enough run-ins with Randian types to see them as the shallow jerks they are. Beyond the cardboard characterization, dumb plotting, and condescending lecturing, this kind of "thinking" is a big part of what's wrong in American society today.
I can't see how any adults other than fascists or sociopaths could buy into this.

Mike Reads Rand, Ep. 1
I've always felt that you shouldn't take positions on things you don't know anything about. So while I'd heard plenty of people talk about Ayn Rand's phonebook-sized novel, they were always conversations I'd had to stay out of. Finally my curiosity got the best of me, and I picked up Atlas Shrugged on a trip to Barnes & Noble. When dealing with a book I know nothing about, I open it up to a random page, read it and, if it's enjoyable, I'll give the book a shot.

I opened up on a page of John Galt's speech.

I did not leave the store with a copy Atlas Shrugged that day.

Several years later, my nagging curiosity finally overwhelmed my better judgement and I started off. It's a relatively easy read despite the size, mainly because of the straight-forward nature of the story, but don't let that fool you - this book can be one of the most torturous slogs you'll ever endure for the simple reason that Rand doesn't have any characters in Atlas. Instead, she populates her book with a series of shambling automata that spout three-page long lectures supporting whatever ideology they're meant to represent at the drop of that hat. Ignoring all the other problems with her characters, people simply do not act this way. Every conversation tangents off into lectures thinly veiled as dialog, and it gets progressively more ridiculous every time it happens. Galt's 50-page speech (no, really) is the most egregious example, but Francisco is another common violator - get ready to settle in for a symposium any time he shows up. I realize that this is a philosophical novel, but first and foremost a philosophical novel should be a novel. Plot and writing should never be sacrificed for you to make your point. If you can't manage that and your book devolves in to simple pedagoguery, then maybe non-fiction is the format for you?

Rand may as well use the naming scheme from The Pilgrim's Progress for all the subtlety she displays here. Everyone in Atlas is either pure as the driven snow, righteous and good-natured beyond reproach, or ridiculously evil cartoons, twirling their moustaches while they tie Capitalism and Liberty to the railroad tracks. It also goes without saying that all the good guys are to a person handsome, athletic supermen, while the bad guys are all balding and overweight or cringing weaklings. And of course, when Dagny finally makes it to the striker's hide-out in Galt's Gulch, both the town and its inhabitants are flawlessly perfect and happy.

Which ties directly to the next problem - Rand never shows, she tells. By which I mean to say that even beyond the characterization, she always leads you by the nose. You're never allowed to infer anything; instead, she spells it all out in big crayons so you're sure to get it. If it's tiresome in her characters, it gets even more so when it's drawn out in to her writing in general. For someone who's based her entire philosophy on the intelligence and ability of the individual, she seems amazingly unwilling to trust us to figure things out on our own. She also undermines her own case by beating you over the head with her ideas so constantly. After awhile you start to dread hearing someone talk about personal responsibility or the sanction of the victim.

Which is all a shame, because there are the bones of what could have been a really great book here. The concept of all the creative, productive members of society going on "strike" and abandoning civilization is an interesting one. Rand doesn't do too bad of a job setting the scene either. She manages to create a surprisingly pervasive sense of despair in the book - this is a world that's grinding to a halt and it shows. Also, she does an impressive job of not tying the book to any definable time period. Sure, the prevalence of passenger rail travel and the fact that TVs appear only briefly towards the end is something of a give-away to people reading it today, but otherwise it's a story with remarkably little to demarcate when it should take place. I also have to give her credit for the first half of the book, where Dagny and Rearden start to piece together what's going on and try and to find the inventor of the discarded, revolutionary motor they find. This section actually reminded me somewhat of The Crying of Lot 49 - there's the same sense of a grand conspiracy just beyond view and the nagging suspicion that the conspirators are all around them. And the entire book does move briskly when people aren't speechifying - there's always some new scheme or plot twist going on.

But then the last half ruins what little goodwill the book may have eked out in the beginning, as the book slams to a halt for Galt's speech and the "moochers" (groan) ratchet up their vaudevillian evil to even greater heights. It's genuinely funny to watch as they progressively screw things up worse and worse every time they try to solve a problem, but it's the loud abrasive humor of a pulp novel, not the bitting satire Rand so clearly intended it to be. Which is a good metaphor for the story in general - it reads like a pulp. And while I love pulps, they're not the vehicle for getting across arguments about the nature of truth and beauty. Like I said earlier, I feel that these sorts of works should be novels first, and I'm rating her novel, not her philosophical arguments. Rand's ideas are certainly interesting and she does make her case here, but her book pays a huge price to do so.

Also, Rand has some weird ideas about sex and that's all the farther I'm going to touch that one.

While I do value the philosophical ideas presented in this book, I find it challenging to overlook it's extended speeches, one-dimensional characters, and didactic tone, which ultimately impacted my appreciation for the work.

I read this book as a teenager while recovering from a long bout of viral fever which had left me bedridden for almost a month: I had exhausted all my other books and forced to rummage through old shelves in my house. (Ironically, I read The Grapes of Wrath also at the same time.) My teenage mind was captivated by the "dangerous" ideas proposed by Ayn Rand. At that time, India was having an inefficient "mixed" economy comprising all the negative aspects of capitalism and socialism, and Ms. Rand seemed to point a way out of the quagmire.

Almost thirty years hence, I find the novel (if it can be called that - Ayn Rand's idea of fiction is a bunch of pasteboard characters put there as her mouthpieces) to be silly beyond imagination. The premise is laughable; the characters entirely forgettable; and the writing, abyssmal. The idea that governments governing the least and allowing a "winner-take-all" economy to flourish will solve all the world's woes ("Social Darwinism", a word I've heard used to describe her philosophy) will not wash anywhere today, I would wager - even with the hard-core adherents of the GOP in the USA. Especially when we look at Europe, where capitalism has gone into a downward spiral.

Ms. Rand, sorry to say, Atlas didn't shrug: Atlas collapsed!

Apparently I agree with Ayn Rand.

I also disagree with Ayn Rand.

I also firmly believe that true ignorance is failing to look at all sides of the argument and cognitive dissonance should be fought.

Given that, this book should probably have just been a series of essays since all the character interaction was simply as set up for another 10 page monologue for Ms. Rand's ideas.

Having said ALL of that, I still actually did like the book overall despite its lack of characters (there were two) since they were all either pro-objectivism or anti and if either they were just a base to go off on either premise.

I thought the ideas were thought-provoking and though she paints a picture that people can actually be as selfish as the main protagonists, which is absolutely crazy to me, I understand that it was more effective to write them that way to establish the points she's trying to make.

I tend to not get political here, but I do lean conservative (probably more libertarian) so that will explain enjoying the book more than others who are not as fiscally conservative as me. I do think freedoms for business should be preserved or else the failings of society that occurred in Atlas Shrugged could happen to us, but I also realize businesses need someone (government) to curb those tendencies to favor profits over the lives of people (read Sinclair's The Jungle).

Having a degree in economics, I learned that people operate on what they have the incentive to do. If money is your incentive, you will work harder for it. If others' welfare is your incentive, you will work hard for them. Bill Gates helped more people through his business endeavors than Mother Teresa. I have a hard time seeing the uproar about monetary inequality, which doesn't address poverty - a completely different issue. I want incentives to be high for people to create drugs that help the world, or technology that makes life better and easier. I don't want the incentives to create more people depending on those producing. That's where I agree with Rand.

Now, do I agree with Rand that if you're not producing or helping the world, you should just rot (at least what I get from it)? No, not at all. I think there are plenty of ways that people need assistance and we need to account for those individuals. Is it nearly the number that use assistance even now? I do not believe so. And on top of that why do we automatically assume that the government is the only way by which the poor can obtain that assistance?

There are a lot of reviewers that revile this book for its conservative ideals, but I was surprised to find there's a lot in here to support if you are progressive, especially regarding women's rights. Atlas Shrugged was published in the 50's and AS promotes the sexual freedoms of women almost as much as freedom of business. Dagney Taggart did what she want with whom she wanted and wasn't afraid to let the world know. I thought this was madly progressive for a book published at this time. Apparently, Rand doesn't just apply her laissez faire attitude solely to business.

Anyway, luckily my political rant is toward the middle so no one will read it anyway. :) Did I enjoy Atlas Shrugged? I did, mostly for the ideas, not so much for the characters or the writing. Do I think this book and its ideas are extreme? Definitely. Would I recommend it? Wholeheartedly (maybe on Audio though?) because I think those ideas are good to address in your own mind whether or not you end up agreeing with them. Is there a healthy middle ground? Yes. Is it the extremes that left us with Trump as president? I do believe so.

4 out of 5 Stars (highly recommended to challenge your thinking)

no, REALLY?!?! people LOVE this...but i just... i realize that, in disliking cucumbers, i am siding with a very scant and unpopular team, but i have my reasons: i chewed on them while i was teething, so it's an association thing. i realize they have merit and i love all other veggies, it's just they're not for me. but it seems more people like this book than even cucumbers, which we know is saying a lot. and this book's got NOTHING going for it. except it's heavy. i mean, is that it? b/c there are other long great books; you have a long trip and need entertainment and a paperweight, take maybe moby dick!! this is a zillion pages of awfully constructed sentences and achingly stupid storyline with cardboard characters and uninspired philosophy. really, ayn rand has so little to say in general that it is just shocking that so many people will listen to her attempt to flesh out a one-line theory ad nauseum in painful and impotent redundancy. it's really really awful. which would be fine except people really claim to glean something from it. i think i missed the page with the free money or something. i'd rather eat a cucumber for every worthless page than have to suffer through it again.

Seriously? People think this is a well-written book with something to say?

I don't want to ruin the ending for anyone who hasn't read it, but it goes a little something like this: the narrative "heroes" of the book end up flying over the country watching it burn, millions dying, feeling smug about having righted an egregious wrong: people didn't acknowledge their superiority.

The message of the book was that there are people who are inherently better than most and that the world should bow to them and let them run the world.

Give me a break.

I just don't like Ayn Rand. Her world view offends me at a visceral level. Her writing is serviceable so kudos to her editor.