Quotes About Ownership

If this is what has beaten us, he thought, the guilt is ours.

Look, boys," he said wearily. "I know what you want. You want to eat my mills and have them, too. And all I want to know is this: what makes you think it's possible?

Hank Rearden is the kind of man who sticks his name on everything he touches. You may, from this, form your own opinion about the character of Hank Rearden.

To be a victim is to abdicate responsibility, to in effect give up most of all on yourself.

You might be locked in a world not of your own making, her eyes said, but you still have a claim on how it is shaped. You still have responsibilities.

Look at yourself before you pass judgment. Don't make someone else clean up your mess.

If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have to draw the line somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family. Your father, he never understood this, I think.

It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I imagined it. It just wasn't mine. I felt as if I was living out someone else's romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass.

Everything is organized. If something is broken, I fix it. If something goes wrong, it's my own fault. If I have it, I send money to the family, and they can do with it what they want, and I won't depend on them, and they won't depend on me.

When you make a commitment to a relationship, you invest your attention and energy in it more profoundly because you now experience ownership of that relationship

To make a mess that another person will have to deal with - the dropped socks, the toothpaste sprayed on the bathroom mirror, the dirty dishes left from a late-night snack - is to exert domination in one of its more silent and intimate forms.

Do the owners have any idea of the misery that goes into rendering their homes motel-perfect? Would they be bothered if they did know, or would they take a sadistic pride in what they have purchased --boasting to dinner guests, for example, that their floors are cleaned only with the purest of fresh human tears?...I have never employed a cleaning person or service...because this is just not the kind of relationship I want to have with another human being.

No one is morally justified in removing a man from his own soil, taking him to a faraway country and keeping him there by force. And no man is morally entitled to own another.

Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one, My life; what I stole from history, and how I live with it.

For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads. You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they'll still move toward him. Without cease they'll bend to his light.

But nothing on this earth is guaranteed, when you get right down to it, you know? I've been thinking about that. About how your kids aren't really YOURS, they're just these people that you try to keep an eye on, and hope you'll all grow up someday to like each other and still be in one piece. What I mean is, everything you get is really just on loan. Does that make sense? Sure, I said. Like library books. Sooner or later they've all got to go back into the nightdrop.

Communism? Most people have no idea what it is. I do not exaggerate. Look around this restaurant, ask any of these fine citizens. 'Excuse me, sir, I've been thinking of an idea, a bunch of working people owning the means of their own production. What do you make of that?' You know, he might be all for it.

A territory is only possessed for a moment in time.

One percent of the brotherhood has their hands on most of the bread. They own the country, their god is the free market, and most people are so unhorrified they won't even question the system. If it makes a profit, that's the definition of good. If it grows, you have to stand back and let it. The free market has exactly the same morality as a cancer cell.

It seems like almost anything is better than having only yourself to blame when you screw things up.

We had the moon in the window to smile on us for a minute and tell us the world was ours. Because all the adults had gone off somewhere and left everything in our hands.

She knew from other places she'd worked that rich people liked owning things made by different kinds of people--Africans, Eskimos, Native Americans. It didn't seem to matter what the object looked like, or to what gory purpose it might have been put, as long as it had belonged to some other people first, and as long ago as possible.

As the long limousine purred to life Edwina felt as if she were Elizabeth, setting sail to battle the Spanish Armada. She was Elizabeth, damn it! What she had built no one was going to take away from her. Not her house, not her hotels, not her fine stable of horses -- and most especially not the young thoroughbred she had left sleeping by the side of her Olympic-size outdoor pool. Some pleasures, she decided, were simply too enticing to give up.

once that each of us is the author of our own lives? That we are responsible for what we are? For the deeds, both good and bad, that we do?