Quotes About Challenge

The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it. All that Dagny wanted of life was contained in the desire to hold her head as he did.

Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?" "Yes." "My dear fellow, who will let you?" "That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?

It was a race he was running now, a race between his rent money and... he did not know the name of the other contestant. Perhaps it was every man whom he passed on the street.

The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found honor in challenging; it was ineptitude—a gray spread of cotton that 'seemed soft and shapeless, that could offer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a barrier in her way.

He looked at the paper before him. He wondered why ineptitude should exist and have its say.

I'm not going to help you pretend—by arguing with you—that the reality you're talking about is not what it is, that there's still a way to make it work and to save your neck. There isn't.

The status was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. He held his head as if he faced a challenge and found joy in his capacity to meet it. All that Dagny wanted of life was contained in the desire to hold her head as he did.

When everybody agrees," Taggart's voice suddenly went shrill, "when people are unanimous, how does one man dare to dissent? By what right? That's what I want to know—by what right?

You honest men are such a problem and such a headache. But we knew you'd slip sooner or later—and this is just what we wanted. You seem to be pleased about it. Don't I have good reason to be? But, after all, I did break one of your laws. Well, what do you think they're for?

He asked simply, as if the matter of her presence were not unusual at all: "Did you have a hard time climbing those stairs?" She answered, "A little. All climbing is hard. But it's usually worth it.

Si viese usted a Atlas, el gigante que sostiene al mundo sobre sus hombros, si usted viese que él estuviese de pie, con la sangre latiendo en su pecho, con sus rodillas doblándose, con sus brazos temblando, pero todavía intentando mantener al mundo en lo alto con sus últimas fuerzas, y cuanto mayor sea su esfuerzo, mayor es el peso que el mundo carga sobre sus hombros, ¿qué le diría usted que hiciese? [...] Que se rebele.

if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders—what would you tell him to do?" "I . . . don't know. What . . . could he do? What would you tell him?" "To shrug.

they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.

Good God, Dagny! Do you expect me to be afraid of an object like James?

I fear for your future, Kira,' said Victor. 'It's time to get reconciled to life. You won't get far with those ideas of yours.' 'That,' said Kira, 'depends on what direction I want to go.

They've done their best to make it harder for you, haven't they?" he said.

Reason is not automatic. Those that deny it cannot be conquered by it.

Instead of building new furnaces, thought Rearden, he was now running a losing race to keep the old ones going; instead of starting new ventures, new research, new experiments in the use of Rearden Metal, he was spending the whole of his energy on a quest for sources of iron ore: like the men at the dawn of the Iron Age—he thought—but with less hope.

El adversario al que se veía obligada a combatir no le parecía ya digno de la lucha ni de la victoria; no era una superior inteligencia la que desafiaba, sino la ineptitud; una gris extensión algodonosa, blanda y sin forma, que no ofrecía resistencia a nada ni a nadie...

For the rest of us, it is a miniature preview—in the microcosm of the academic world—of what is to happen to the country at large, if the present cultural trend remains unchallenged.

Jim appeared to her suddenly as a man who had tried to find a middle course between two poles—Meigs and herself—and who was now seeing that his course was narrowing and that he was to be ground between two straight walls.

Education's goal is to impart knowledge, and knowledge is not only heretical, but unpredictable and often uncomfortable.

I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed to immutable.

The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted.