Who is John Galt?
Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.
Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lots of an abandoned mind.
When I die I hope to go to heaven – whatever that is – and I want to be able to afford the price of admission.
He, too, stood looking at her for a moment – and it seemed to her that it was not a look of greeting after an absence, but the look of someone who had thought of her every day of that year. She could not be certain, it was only an instant, so brief that just as she caught it, he was turning...
I am. I think. I will.
Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns – or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other.
I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breathe air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. I’ve given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need. This is the only way I can want you to love me.
Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don’t have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy.
To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self esteem, is capable of love – because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed value. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone.
Love is our response to our highest values, and can be nothing else.
Every man builds his world in his own image; he has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence – by his own choice.
A house can have integrity, just like a person,′ said Roark, ’and just as seldom.
Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman’s tool is values; the bureaucrat’s tool is fear.
There are no evil thoughts, Mr. Rearden,” Francisco said softly, “except one: the refusal to think.
This is pity,” he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it.
Roark smiled, “Gail, if this boat were sinking, I’d give my life to save you. Not because it’s any kind of duty. Only because I like you, for reasons and standards of my own. I could die for you. But I couldn’t and wouldn’t live for you.