I think its agreeable to look back occasionally as one’s perspective widens and one grows richer spiritually with the years.
Roark threw his head up once, for a flash of a second, to look at Heller across the table. It was all the introduction they needed; it was like a handshake.
A “selfless,” “disinterested” love is a contradiction in terms: it means that one is indifferent to that which one values.
Wynand’s face was more than the face of a stranger: a stranger’s face is an unapproached potentiality, to be opened if one makes the choice and effort; this was a face known, closed and never to be reached again.
Why should you care about the others?” “Because I like to understand things, and there’s something about people that I can’t understand.
Helplessness was a strange experience, new to her; she had never found it hard to face things and make decisions; but she was not dealing with things – this was a fog without shapes or definitions, in which something kept forming and shifting before it could be seen...
All the codes of ethics they’ll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that’s on a gold standard.
It was the only lie she ever told. She did not do it to protect Francisco; she did it because she felt, for some reason which she could not define, that the incident was a secret too precious to share.
The story is the story of Howard Roark’s triumph. It has to show what the man is, what he wants and how he gets it. It has to be a triumphant epic of man’s spirit, a hymn glorifying a man’s “I.” It has to show every conceivable hardship and obstacle on his way – and how he triumphs over them, why he has to triumph.
One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside – just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it. Years.
People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they’re reflecting too. You know, like the senseless infinity you get from two mirrors facing each other across a narrow passage. Usually in the more vulgar kind of hotels. Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose.
No battle was hard, no decision was dangerous where there was no soggy uncertainty, no shapeless evasion to encounter.
When numbers are substituted for morality, and no individual can claim a right, but any gang can assert any desire whatever, when compromise is the only policy expected of those in power, and the preservation of the moment’s “stability,” of peace at any price, is their only goal – the winner, necessarily, is whoever presents the most unjust and irrational demands; the system serves as an open invitation to do so.
Since when did you take to abstract philosophy? You’re only a businessman, you’re not qualified to deal with questions of principle, you ought to leave it to the experts.
Dagny’s bearing seemed almost indecent, because this was the way a woman would have faced a ballroom centuries ago, when the act of displaying one’s half-naked body for the admiration of men was an act of daring, when it had meaning, and but one meaning, acknowledged by all as a high adventure.
I, I am the day after tomorrow.
When thinkers accept those who deny the existence of thinking, as fellow thinkers of a different school of thought – it is they who achieve the destruction of the mind. They grant the enemy’s basic premise, thus granting the sanction of reason to formal dementia. A basic premise is an absolute that permits no co-operation with its antithesis and tolerates no tolerance.
Men who have found tbe right way of life do not seek to escape from awareness, to obliterate their consciousness, and to drug themselves out of existence. Drug addiction is the confession of an unbearable inner state.
He knew that the conference was a trap; he knew also that he was walking into it with nothing for any trappers to gain.
She answered: “You know what I want,” her voice heavy and flat. “Yes. But I want to hear you say it. All of it.” “If you wish.” Her voice had the sound of efficiency, obeying an order with metallic precision. “I want to sleep with you. Now, tonight, and at any time you may care to call me. I want your naked body, your skin. your mouth, your hands. I want you – like this – not hysterical with desire – but coldly and consciously – without dignity and without regrets – I want you.