Lillian Rearden: Ha! I caught you! You’re a cheater! I don’t know who, and I won’t look, because I don’t want a divorce, or even a separation, and despite your constant emotional distance, your lack of interest in my life, the creepy sexual domination thing that you want from women, and your infidelity – remember, readers, I’m the bad guy!
Hank Rearden: Whatevs. I’m still going to boink my mistress. Remember, readers, my emotional distance, lack of interest in my wife’s life, the creepy sexual domination I demand but don’t even inform her about, and my infidelity make me the good guy!
Commie Scientist: Project X is a secret, which is why I keep bringing it up! Hank Rearden, you’ll sell us the Rearden Metal or I’ll have you arrested for being a black marketeer!
Hank: You disgust me because you don’t want to sell things at fair market value!
Commie Scientist: Arrest him, but don’t send him to jail or anything! Arrest in in a way that doesn’t so much as inconvenience him! That’s how horrible our society is! We don’t even put indicted racketeers in jail!
Dagny Taggart: I know that Capitalist Coal Miner will suddenly retire, next! I wonder where they’re all going? Even though I know who the next man to vanish is, I won’t put a tail on him to see where he goes! Instead, I’ll just rush over there and try to talk him out of it!
Capitalist Coal Miner: Too late! The man who talked me into retiring just left and there’s nothing you can say to make me stay! It isn’t John Galt. (Totally is John Galt.)
Dagny: Even though I know you’re going to be leaving to wherever it is that people go when they suddenly retire, I won’t try to follow you, or hire anyone to follow you!
Kit Bradley: No wonder you’re not getting to the bottom of this! You’re an idiot!
Capitalst Coal Miner: I’ll give you my company, if you want.
Dagny: I’m not a looter!
Kit: Well, not counting that time when you forced open that guy’s shop and stole it for your own benefits, or that time you stole the Miracle Engine from that dude’s factory, or that time when you hired that engineer to fix the Miracle Engine using some else’s lab . . .
Hank: Come into my plant, Francisco d’Anaconia!
Francisco d’Anaconia: I will! Also, taxes are evil. Blah, blah, blah, the same stuff the book has been repeating for four hundred pages.
Hank: Wow! I never heard anyone say that before in the previous four hundred pages! You’re so dreamy. Let me masturbate all over you!
Francisco: Hark! A blast furnace is in trouble! Let’s go save it!
Hank: Good thing we were around to save that blast furnace. I’m running the furnaces with bad ore, and I’m hiring young, inexperienced, and untrained people to operate the furnaces! Why am I having so much trouble with my furnaces? It can’t be MY fault! It’s SOCIETY! SOCIETY is evil!
Kit: Waitasec, isn’t that what you say is so bad about your villains . . . oh, good grief, Rand! You’re supposed to admire consistency!