It's the "Most obnoxious quote from 'Atlas Shrugged'" contest!!

[ProfessorPlum]

You've been waiting for it, now it is time.

Entries must be 1-3 sentences long. No long-winded paragraphs.

They must reflect the incredible barren wasteland which is the soul of the auther, Ayn Rand.

If we get 10 or more, we'll set up a poll to find the winner.

[Emboldened Chimp]

1. No long-winded paragraphs?

Good luck.

[Warpy]

13. Right, that's the real contest

finding a sentence in that horror that is less than 60 overwrought words long.

[SnowGoose]

2. OMG - any of the sex stuff.

yech.

[jpgray]

3. Our aim is to develop the bottle within

:)

[ProfessorPlum]

4. My first entry

Dagny Taggart: "Well, I've always been unpopular in school and it didn't bother me, but now I've discovered the reason . . . They dislike me because I've always had the best grades in class. I don't even have to study. I always get A's."

Book 1, chapter five.

[Jim__]

25. Is that the actual quote?

"...I've always been unpopular in school and it didn't bother me..."

It looks like Ms Perfect screwed up her tenses.

[fertilizeonarbusto]

5. "Atlas Farted," you mean n/t

[ProfessorPlum]

6. Another winner

From book 1, chapter nine.

As Dagny and Rearden contemplate undeveloped countryside, Dagny says,

"But think how often we've heard people complain that billboards ruin the appearance of the countryside. Well, there's the unruined countryside for them to admire." She added, "They're the people I hate."


I just love that little added dig at the end. Nice.

[stinkeefresh]

9. in context

is the implication that they think the unruined countryside is not pleasant?

[ProfessorPlum]

12. Yes

and the protagonist hates people who do find it pleasant. Also what is going on is that the country is decaying because in her fantasyworld, the government treats businesses and corporatists poorly, and discouraging business leads to decay of cities and towns to the point where nature is taking things back over.

But what is really happening in this passage is that they are just driving down a road through some countryside, both wishing they could see some billboards. Freaky.

[stinkeefresh]

15. nutty.

So if I want to read one of these so as to properly argue with a few friends of mine (scary how popular she is, even in the intellectual counter-culture LA circles I travel in) it would be Atlas Shrugged?

[ProfessorPlum]

16. I wouldn't waste that much of my time on it

I would recommend the much shorter, but equally annoying, paeon to selfishness "Anthem", if you want to get an idea of how much of a burden she felt her fellow people to be.

[stinkeefresh]

18. great.

Anthem it is.

[Marie26]

24. Annoying Anthem quote

"We, Equality 7-2521, were not happy in those years in the Home of the Students. It was not that the learning was too hard for us. It was that the learning was too easy. This is a great sin, to be born with a head which is too quick. It is not good to be different from our brothers, but it is evil to be superior to them. The Teachers told us so, and they frowned when they looked upon us."
Oh, the gifted are so oppressed & burdened! This seems to be a constant theme in her books. I wonder if a lot of Ayn Rand's philosophy came from a bad grade school experience. :)

[MisterP]

22. spoilerus maximus:

"people invent the word 'I' and the lightbulb"

[ixion]

7. Who is John Galt?

nuff said. ;-)

[rox63]

8. My personal cross to bear

My father insisted that one of my names be from a character in one of Ayn Rand's books. So my middle name is Dominique. I've never actually read any of her books, since it that was what Dad wanted me to do. He actually wrote his Master's thesis on Objectivism, and I remember seeing copies of Rand's magazine "The Objectivist" laying around the house when I was growing up. But I survived, and came out the other end as a liberal. :D

[ProfessorPlum]

10. Scary.

Good for you.

[stinkeefresh]

11. thanks for this thread

I've yet to read any Rand, but I have always had the nagging suspician that her ideas are bit cancerous. I will be refreshing my browser with glee.

[ProfessorPlum]

14. this could be fun for you, then

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0452011876/ref=cm_rev_sort/102-3478487-9569702?customer-reviews.sort_by=%2BOverallRating&x=7&y=9&me=ATVPDKIKX0DER

It is a link to AS on Amazon, and if I've done it right, it should be sorted from lowest rated reviews to highest.

Happy reading. Cancerous is definitely an appropriate adjective.

[stinkeefresh]

17. that WAS fun

great comments there! But 1070 pages that I know I'll hate? Yipe. Maybe I won't be reading this after all.

If I'm reading 1000 pages it better be 5 Italo Calvino books, three Vonnegut, or one Harry Potter.

[Coexist]

19. If you read every third page you will probably get the

gist of the book. So many wasted hours on my part - waiting for her "genius" to shine through. Ugh.

[pscot]

21. Save yourself the grief

of wading through 1000 acres of turgid prose. Rent the Fountainhead, with Gary Cooper and a young and stunning Paatricia Neal as Dominique. The screenplay was written by Rand herself and compresses Objectivism into a highly watchable, if bizarre, 2 hour package.

[Coexist]

20. How about her touching tribute to robber barons!

"For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being – the self-made man – the American industrialist"

God bless Jim Fisk!

Here is a quote from an article about the rise of Randites in corporate America:

http://www.fnf.org.za/Liberal_Thinkers/atlasshr.htm

"Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, CEO of the Leadership Institute at Yale University, said executives who take refuge in the capitalist utopia of Atlas Shrugged are "reading themselves into a trance of defensive self-delusion."

Hershey's success unexplained

He says great American industrialists were in fact community-minded, going back to the pioneer frontiersmen who circled their wagons and built barns together. The philosophy of Atlas Shrugged does not explain successful CEOs such as Milton Hershey, who during the Depression provided employees of his chocolate company with free medical care and paid off the mortgages of every church in town, Sonnenfeld says.

Rand should have written fewer screenplays and "watched more Frank Capra to better understand the real values of her new adopted country," Sonnenfeld says.

At the same time, "Ayn Rand did not anticipate CEOs who would loot their firms for hundreds of millions of dollars before bankrupting them," Sonnenfeld says"

[Uncle Roy]

23. kick

[ken_v_k]

26. Atlas Flubbed

Francisco, speaking to Dagny.  "If it's any kind of
atonement, which it isn't... whatever I made you suffer,
that's how I paid for it... by knowing what I was doing to
you and having to do it..." (p 618)

So Francisco suffered because he chose to make Dagny suffer? 
Maybe he shouldn't have made her suffer in the first place? 
Puh-LEASE!

Many other errors from Atlas Shrugged at www.AtlasFlubbed.com