Key ideas: Published in 1936. We the Living is Ayn Rand’s first novel.
"The essence of my theme is contained in the words of Irina, a minor character of the story, a young girl who is sentenced to imprisonment in Siberia and knows that she will never return:
“There’s something I would like to understand. And I don’t think anyone can explain it. . . . There’s your life. You begin it, feeling that it’s something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it’s like a sacred treasure. Now it’s over, and it doesn’t make any difference to anyone, and it isn’t that they are indifferent, it’s just that they don’t know, they don’t know what it means, that treasure of mine, and there’s something about it that they should understand. I don’t understand it myself, but there’s something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it? What?” (Ayn Rand)
"Kira and the freckled girl. They were half through their bowls of buckwheat mush, when the indignant class leader approached them. “Do you know what you're doing, Argounova?" she asked, eyes blazing. "Eating mush," answered Kira. "Won't you sit down?" "Do you know what this girl here has done?" "I haven't the slightest idea." "You haven't? Then why are you doing this for her?" "You're mistaken. I am not doing this for her, I am doing it against twenty-eight other girls."
"So you think it's smart to go against the majority?"
I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it's safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries.
The house committee has voted a resolution to assess the tenants in proportion to their social standing, for the purpose of water pipes, to repair same, in addition to rent. Here's a list of who pays what. Have the money in my office no later than ten o'clock tomorrow morning. Good night, citizen.
Doubenko---Worker---in #12 . . . . . 3,000,000 rubles
Rilnikov---Soviet Employee---in #13 . . . . . 5,000,000 rubles
Argounov---Private Trader---in #14 . . . . . 50,000,000 rubles
And the special assessment will be divided in proportion to the social standing of the tenants.
The workers pay three per cent and the Free Professions ten, and the Private Traders and unemployed—the rest.
Who’s for—raise your hands. . . . Comrade secretary, count the citizens’ hands. . . . Who’s against—raise your hands. . . . Comrade Michliuk, you can’t raise your hand for and against on the one and same proposition. . . .”
“One can also fight.”
“Fight what? Sure, you can muster the most heroic in you to fight lions. But to whip your soul to a sacred white heat to fight lice . . . ! No, that’s not good construction, comrade engineer. The equilibrium’s all wrong.”
“Leo, you don’t believe that yourself.”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to believe anything. I don’t want to see too much. Who suffers in this world? Those who lack something? No. Those who have something they should lack. A blind man can’t see, but it’s more impossible not to see for one whose eyes are too sharp. More impossible and more of a torture. If only one could lose sight and come down, down to the level of those who never want it, never miss it.”
“I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say, as so many of our enemies do, that you admire our ideals, but loathe our methods.”
“I loathe your ideals.”
“Why?”
“For one reason, mainly, chiefly and eternally, no matter how much your Party promises to accomplish, no matter what paradise it plans to bring mankind. Whatever your other claims may be, there’s one you can’t avoid, one that will turn your paradise into the most unspeakable hell: your claim that man must live for the state.”
“What better purpose can he live for?”
“Don’t you know,” her voice trembled suddenly in a passionate plea she could not hide, “don’t you know that there are things, in the best of us, which no outside hand should dare to touch? Things sacred because, and only because, one can say: ‘This is mine’? Don’t you know that we live only for ourselves, the best of us do, those who are worthy of it? Don’t you know that there is something in us which must not be touched by any state, by any collective, by any number of millions?”
He answered: “No.”
“Comrade Taganov,” she whispered, “how much you have to learn!”
He looked down at her with his quiet shadow of a smile and patted her hand like a child’s. “Don’t you know,” he asked, “that we can’t sacrifice millions for the sake of the few?”
“Can you sacrifice the few? When those few are the best? Deny the best its right to the top—and you have no best left. What are your masses but millions of dull, shrivelled, stagnant souls that have no thoughts of their own, no dreams of their own, no will of their own, who eat and sleep and chew helplessly the words others put into their brains? And for those you would sacrifice the few who know life, who are life? I loathe your ideals because I know no worse injustice than the giving of the undeserved. Because men are not equal in ability and one can’t treat them as if they were. And because I loathe most of them.”
“I’m glad. So do I.”
“But then. . . .”
“Only I don’t enjoy the luxury of loathing. I’d rather try to make them worth looking at, to bring them up to my level. And you’d make a great little fighter—on our side.”
“I think you know I could never be that.”
“I think I do. But why don’t you fight against us, then?”
“Because I have less in common with you than the enemies who fight you, have. I don’t want to fight for the people, I don’t want to fight against the people, I don’t want to hear of the people. I want to be left alone—to live.”
“Isn’t it a strange request?”
“Is it? And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldn’t it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men?”
“And if your plumbing pipes got badly out of order, wouldn’t it be preposterous to sit still and not make an effort to mend them?”
“I wish you luck, Comrade Taganov. I hope that when you find those pipes running red with your own blood—you’ll still think they were worth mending.”
“Andrei, you must think . . . once in a while . . . that it’s possible that . . . What if anything should happen to me?”
“Why think about it?”
“But it’s possible.”
She felt suddenly as if the words of his answer were the links of a chain she would never be able to break: “It’s also possible for every one of us to have to face a death sentence some day. Does it mean that we have to prepare for it?”