He was a very young man. He had just graduated from college – in the spring of the year 1935 – and he wanted to decide whether life was worth living. He did not know that this was the question in his mind. He did not think of dying. He thought only that he wished to find joy and reason and meaning in life – and that none had been offered to him anywhere.
Do not cry that it is our duty to serve you. We do not recognize such duty. Do not cry that you need us. We do not consider need a claim. Do not cry that you own us. You don’t.
No one can tell men what they must live for. No one can take that right – because there are things in men, in the best of us, which are above all states, above all collectives!
Howard, everything you’ve done in your life is wrong according to the stated ideals of mankind. And here you are. And somehow it seems a huge joke on the whole world.
Wheeling his bicycle by his side, the boy took the narrow path down the slope of the hill to the valley and the houses below. Roark looked after him. He had never seen that boy before and he would never see him again. He did not know that he had given someone the courage to face a lifetime.
He hated stupidity. It was the only emotion I had ever seen him display toward people – a.
Listen, kid,” the sob sister said to her, when she stood in her room for the last time, the lace of the wedding veil streaming like crystal foam from her hair to the blotched planks of the floor. “You think that if one gets hurt in life, it’s through one’s own sins – and that’s true, in the long run. But there are people who’ll try to hurt you through the good they see in you – knowing that it’s the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don’t let it break you when you discover that.
In a world that proclaims the non-existence of the mind, the moral righteousness of rule by brute force, the penalizing of the competent in favor of the incompetent, the sacrifice of the best to the worst – in such a world, the best have to turn against society and have to become its deadliest enemies.
In all proper relationships there is no sacrifice of anyone to anyone... Men exchange their work by free, mutual consent to mutual advantage when their personal interests agree and they both desire the exchange. If they do not desire it, they are not forced to deal with each other. They seek further. This is the only possible form of relationship between equals. Anything else is a relation of slave to master, or victim to executioner.
Thought – he told himself quietly – is a weapon one uses in order to act. No action was possible. Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice. No choice was left to him. Thought sets one’s purpose and the way to reach it. In the matter of his life being torn piece by piece out of him, he was to have no voice, no purpose, no way, no defense.
We have met once,” she said, “at the Holcombes. If Mr. Roark remembers.
I had felt no hatred in all the years when they rejected me. If my work was new, I had to give them time to learn, if I took pride in being first to break a trail to a height of my own, I had no right to complain if others were slow to follow.
Self-sacrifice, we drool, is a virtue. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feeling? The independence of his thoughts? But these are a man’s supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain.
She walked down the hill and she found relief in the unnatural stillness of the earth around her, the stillness of full light without sun, of leaves without motion, of a luminous, waiting silence.
The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on.
He saw for the first time that he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.
One does not bargain over inches of evil.
No,” she said, before he could utter a word, “you can’t take me home. I have a car waiting. Thank you just the same.
Whatever it was that others sought in life, their right to what they now felt was all the two of them wished to find.
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.