# Quote — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

> "God help us, ma'am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we'd been given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it—for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got."

- Author: [Ayn Rand](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ayn-rand.md)
- Book: [Atlas Shrugged](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ayn-rand/atlas-shrugged.md)
- Page: 665
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged#Chapter_Ten:_The_Sign_of_the_Dollar) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/ayn-rand/atlas-shrugged/god-help-us-maam

## More from this book

> "Get the hell out of my way!"

p. 1125 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ayn-rand/atlas-shrugged/get-the-hell.md)

> "Never think of pain or danger or enemies a moment longer than is necessary to fight them."

p. 1092 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ayn-rand/atlas-shrugged/never-think-of-pain.md)

> "People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked. And if one gains the immediate purpose of the lie - the price one pays is the destruction of what the gain was intended to serve. The man who lies to the world is the world's slave from then on."

p. 859 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/ayn-rand/atlas-shrugged/people-think-that.md)