I shall answer all the questions you are afraid to ask me openly. Do I wish to pay my workers more than their services are worth to me? I do not. Do I wish to sell my product for less than my customers are willing to pay me? I do not. Do I wish to sell it at a loss or give it away? I do not.
There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of another – if men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn’t.
There was a time when men were afraid that somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to their fellows. Nowadays, they’re afraid that somebody will name what everybody knows.
I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom.” “You call that freedom?” “To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.” “What if you found something you wanted?” “I won’t find it. I won’t choose to see it. It would be part of that lovely world of yours. I’d have to share it with all the rest of you – and I wouldn.
It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man’s proper stature – and that the rest will betray it. It is those few that move the world and give life its meaning – and it is those few that I have always sought to address.
Eddie, what do we care about people like him? We’re driving an express, and they’re riding on the roof, making a lot of noise about being leaders. Why should we care? We have enough power to carry them along – haven’t we?
We lived by that which we held to be good and punished that which we held to be evil. You live by that which you denounce as evil and punish that which you know to be good.
He seemed casually at home, as if he felt that the place belonged to them, as they always felt wherever they went together.
Reason requires freedom, self-confidence and self-esteem. It requires the right to think and to act on the guidance of one’s thinking – the right to live by one’s own independent judgment. Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.
Look,” said Roark evenly, and pointed at the window. “Can you see the campus and the town? Do you see how many men are walking and living down there? Well, I don’t give a damn what any or all of them think about architecture – or about anything else, for that matter. Why should I consider what their grandfathers thought of it?
She did not mind this new background; she was indifferent to the slums as she had been indifferent to the drawing rooms.
Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic – and only of addition at that?
Don’t you know... don’t you know that there are things, in the best of us, which no outside hand should dare 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 the millions?
It was a sudden, stunned state of quiet drunkenness, complete in itself, their hair mingled like the rays of two bodies in space that had achieved their meeting, she saw that he walked with his eyes closed, as if even sight would now be an intrusion.
She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer who killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it birth.
He had to choke the knowledge. He had to kill the vision. He had to obey and draw the lines as instructed.
Some day, we shall stop and build a house, when we shall have gone far enough. But we do not have to hasten. The days before us are without end, like the forest.
Keating felt naked... People were his protection against people. Roark had no sense of people. Others gave Keating a feeling of his own value. Roark gave him nothing.
His face gave her nothing in answer: it had that look of respectful severity with which a man stands before the fact that the truth is the truth.
Through all the ages,” he said, “the mind has been regarded as evil, and every form of insult: from heretic to materialist to exploiter – every form of iniquity: from exile to disfranchisement to expropriation – every form of torture: from sneers to rack to firing squad – have been brought down upon those who assumed the responsibility of looking at the world through the eyes of a living consciousness and performing the crucial act of a rational connection.