Atlas Shrugged

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him, lady. He likes to hear himself talk. He don't mean no harm."
"Man's only talent is an ignoble cunning for satisfying the needs of his body," said the old bum. "No
intelligence is required for that.
Don't believe the stories about man's mind, his spirit, his ideals, his sense of unlimited ambition."
"I don't," said a young boy who sat at the end of the counter. He wore a coat ripped across one
shoulder; his square-shaped mouth seemed formed by the bitterness of a lifetime.
"Spirit?" said the old bum. "There's no spirit involved in manufacturing or in sex. Yet these are man's only
concerns. Matter—that's all men know or care about. As witness our great industries—the only
accomplishment of our alleged civilization—built by vulgar materialists with the aims, the interests and the
moral sense of hogs. It doesn't take any morality to turn out a ten-ton truck on an assembly line."
"What is morality?" she asked.
"Judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that
which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. But where does one find it?"
The young boy made a sound that was half-chuckle, half-sneer: "Who is John Galt?"
She drank the coffee, concerned with nothing but the pleasure of feeling as if the hot liquid were reviving
the arteries of her body.
"I can tell you," said a small, shriveled tramp who wore a cap pulled low over his eyes. "I know."
Nobody heard him or paid any attention. The young boy was watching Dagny with a kind of fierce,
purposeless intensity.
"You're not afraid," he said to her suddenly, without explanation, a fiat statement in a brusque, lifeless
voice that had a note of wonder.
She looked at him. "No," she said, "I'm not."
"I know who is John Galt," said the tramp. "It's a secret, but I know it."
"Who?" she asked without interest.
"An explorer," said the tramp. "The greatest explorer that ever lived. The man who found the fountain of
youth."
"Give me another cup. Black," said the old bum, pushing his cup across the counter.
"John Galt spent years looking for it. He crossed oceans, and he crossed deserts, and he went down
into forgotten mines, miles under the earth. But he found it on the top of a mountain. It took him ten years
to climb that mountain. It broke every bone in his body, it tore the skin off his hands, it made him lose his
home, his name, his love.
But he climbed it. He found the fountain of youth, which he wanted to bring down to men. Only he never
came back."