"Why had she always felt that joyous sense of confidence when looking at machines?"

"[Dagny] felt the sweep of an emotion which she could not contain, as of something bursting upward. She turned to the door of the [diesel combustion engine], she threw it open to a screaming jet of sound and escaped into the pounding of the [locomotive]’s heart. . . . 

    "Why had she always felt that joyous sense of confidence when looking at machines?—she thought. In these giant shapes, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the motors was an embodied answer to ‘Why?’ and ‘What for?’—like the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort of mind she worshipped. The motors were a moral code cast in steel. 

    "They are alive, she thought, but their soul operates them by remote control. Their soul is in every man who has the capacity to equal this achievement.”

          ~ Ayn Rand, from her novel Atlas Shrugged

[Hat tip Stephen Boydstun]

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