Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?
What’s wealth but the means of expanding one’s life? There’s two ways one can do it: either by producing more or by producing it faster.
When facing society, the man most concerned, the man who is to do the most and contribute the most, has the least say.
What it does guarantee is that a monopolist whose high profits are caused by high prices, rather than low costs, will soon meet competition originated by the capital market.
It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money – and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.
One can’t be punished for being good. One can’t be penalized for ability. If that is right, then we’d better start slaughtering one another, because there isn’t any right at all in the world!
I know what I want up to the age of two hundred. Know what you want in life and go after it. I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.
They’re all aristocrats, that’s true,” said Wyatt, “because they know that there’s no such thing as a lousy job – only lousy men who don’t care to do it.
They did not speak. Once, she said suddenly, “Mr. Galt.” “Yes?” “No. Nothing. I just wanted to know whether you were still there.” “I will always be there.
She thought that relaxation was attractive only in those for whom it was an unnatural state; then even limpness acquired purpose.
After a while, he went back to his task; he decided that pain was not a valid reason for stopping.
I’ve always been short on time in my life, never on what to use it for.
He did not know why her presence made him confess things unconfessed in his own mind.
And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards – and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.
If a natural fact is neither just nor unjust, by what mental leap does it become a moral problem and an issue of justice? Why should those “favored by nature” be made to atone for what is not an injustice and is not of their making?
The human shapes moving past him in the streets of the city were physical objects without any meaning.
Your witness,” the attorney snapped to Roark. “No questions,” said Roark. Dominique left the stand. The attorney bowed to the bench and said: “The plaintiff rests.” The judge turned to Roark and made a vague gesture, inviting him to proceed. Roark got up and walked to the bench, the brown envelope in hand. He took out of the envelope ten photographs of the Stoddard Temple and laid them on the judge’s desk. He said: “The defense rests.
Why don’t you wish to take any credit for it, James? That’s out of character and out of the policy at which you’re such an expert. In an age when men exist, not by right, but by favor, one does not reject a grateful person, one tries to trap into gratitude as many people as possible. Don’t you want to have me as one of your men under obligation?
He walked with an effortless speed, feeling relaxed by a form of activity that was natural to him.
I’m not going to help you pretend – by arguing with you – that the reality you’re talking about is not what it is, that there’s still a way to make it work and to save your neck. There isn’t.