Who Said IT: 'atlas Shrugged' Villain Or Real-life Public Figure?

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| By Stuhayashi

Stuhayashi

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Quizzes Created: 1 | Total Attempts: 2,032

Questions: 142 | Attempts: 2,032 | Updated: Mar 21, 2023

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Who Said IT: atlas Shrugged Villain Or Real-life Public Figure? - Quiz

I often hear the criticism, "Atlas Shrugged is so far-fetched. The villains are straw men. No one in real life talks like that." I find that criticism funny, because I think many public figures, throughout history and on into the present, have issued statements that sound very much like villains from Atlas Shrugged. For each question on this quiz, I will provide you a quotation. I will ask you to determine whether the statement was issued by an Atlas Shrugged villain or a real-life public figure. After you had entered your Read moreanswer, I will provide the correct answer. If it is an Atlas Shrugged villain, I will name the character who said it and provide the page number for the quotation from the 1992 hardcover edition. (Numbering is different between hardcover and paperback editions. Moreover, the page numbering often changes any time a new edition -- either hardcover or paperback -- is released. ) If the statement was issued by a real-life public figure, I will name the public figure and provide bibliographic information on the source of the quotation. Bear in mind that I am not saying someone is a bad person just because he or she sounds like an Atlas Shrugged villain. I suppose someone might think that real quotations from Ayn Rand sound like fictional characters. Ken Levine, who made the overrated video game BioShock, said as

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Current Version
Mar 21, 2023

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ProProfs Editorial Team
Jan 05, 2015

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Stuhayashi

Who Said IT: 'atlas Shrugged' Villain Or Real-life Public Figure?

"I don’t think there is such a thing as reality."

"Everybody uses the work of everybody else. Nobody ever invents anything."

"I don't believe that people should be empowered to do what pleases them the most. We have a responsibility beyond ourselves."

"...free economy is now on trial. Unless it proves its social value, and assumes its social responsibilities, the people won't stand for it. If it doesn't develop a public spirit, it's done for."

"And that’s the problem: . . . the simplistic notion that people who have wealth are entitled to keep it, and they have an antipathy toward the means of redistributing wealth."

"I'm open-minded enough to believe that two absolutely contradictory propositions can indeed both be able to exist in this wonderful, brilliant world of ours we can only begin to fathom a small percentage of."

"It's logical illogic. . . . In my philosophy, and in what governs my behavior as a journalist in a free country, is that if you start to eliminate this 'glorious gray' -- I would call it -- then you're taking me down the road to a system that has absolutes in it, and that, to me, is anathema."

"...I have enough expertise in politics and history to understand that a free market ends up as monopoly unless you force it to be free."

"...you businessmen have been predicting disaster for years, you've cried catastrophe at every progressive measure and told us we'll perish -- but we haven't."

"In the long run, we'll all be dead."

"The only justification of private property is public service."

"...private property is a trusteeship held for the benefit of society as a whole."

"There must be reasonable restrictions upon competition, else we shall see competition destroyed."

"Markets are the single most destructive thing human beings have ever created."

"Markets are a destructive force and need to be abolished -- replaced with some kind of democratic participatory planning process."

"...we never know what we are talking about. . . . We can never know or understand all the implications of a theory, or its full significance."

"Unlimited freedom means that a strong man is free to bully one who is weak and to rob him of his freedom. This is why we demand that the state should limit freedom to a certain extent, so that everyone’s freedom is to be protected by law."

"...selfish individualism led us into the wasteland of official indifference to the suffering of many."

"...every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it."

"The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare..."

"[...this directive...] does not interfere with the ownership but merely regulates the occupancy of property."

"Here the state must act as the guardian of a millennial future in the face of which the wishes and selfishness of the individual must appear as nothing and submit."

"The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call -- to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness -- idealism. By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow man."

"The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected."

"Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property."

"Every child born into the world should be looked upon by society as so much raw material to be manufactured."

"The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exhaustively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness."

"I want everyone to keep the property that he has acquired for himself according to the principle: benefit to the community precedes benefit to the individual."

"Man? What is man? He's just a collection of chemicals with delusions of grandeur."

"Man's metaphysical pretensions are preposterous."

"...I am in favor of a free economy. A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete."

"You do not grasp the fact that the universe is a solid contradiction."

"The purpose of philosophy is not to seek knowledge, but to prove that knowledge is impossible to man."

"Our culture has sunk into a bog of materialism."

"So we ought to place a limit upon their material greed."

"I think it is perfectly unfair that one man should get all the breaks and leave none to others."

"If everybody else is poor, they won't have any market for their goods. But if they stop being selfish and share the goods they've hoarded -- they'll have a chance to work hard and produce some more."

"When the masses are destitute and yet there are goods available, it's idiotic to expect people to be stopped by some scrap of paper called a property deed."

[This is a preemptive rebuttal to any claim that individual rights trump social collectivism:]"Right is whatever's good for society."

"We need a national subsidy for literature . It is disgraceful that artists are treated like peddlers..."

"These discoveries have led scientists to contradictions which are impossible, according to the human mind, but which exist in reality nonetheless."

"In practice the natural sciences are not, and have never been as 'objective' or 'empirical' as you like to think."

"We will release our spiritual aims from dependence on the owners of material means."

"They break the regulations which protect which protect the common welfare of all -- for the sake of their own personal gain."