Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead (1943)

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I don't intend to build in order to have clients. I intend to have clients in order to build.

Ayn Rand
A building has integrity, just like a man, and just as seldom.

Ayn Rand
He had a big head and a face so ugly it became almost fascinating.

Ayn Rand
Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.

Ayn Rand
Have you felt it too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you- except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them; nothing, not even a sound they can recognize.

Ayn Rand
There were things in my past which I have not liked. But all the things of which I was proud will remain.

Ayn Rand
He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand.... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject.... There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind.

Ayn Rand
No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain (Gail Wynand to Dominique Francon)

Ayn Rand
The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They're either vicious or tragic.

Ayn Rand
The worst wars are religious wars between sects of the same religion or civil wars between brothers of the same race.

Ayn Rand
Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.

Ayn Rand
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.

Ayn Rand
I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline.

Ayn Rand
I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life.

Ayn Rand
You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated

Ayn Rand
Allies never trust each other, but that doesn't spoil their effectiveness.

Ayn Rand
One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name.

Ayn Rand
He wanted her. He knew where to find her. He waited. It amused him to wait, because he knew that the waiting was unbearable to her. He knew that his absence bound her to him in a manner more complete and humiliating than his presence could enforce. He was giving her time to attempt an escape, in order to let her know her own helplessness when he chose to see her again.

Ayn Rand
It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there is service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be master.

Ayn Rand
The only thing that matters my goal my reward my beginning my end is the work itself. My work done my way. A private personal selfish egotistical motivation. That's the only way I function. That's all I am.

Ayn Rand
One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one's own importance. There's no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes

Ayn Rand
I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.

Ayn Rand
Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization — this tea ritual and the detective novel.

Ayn Rand
It's true that there's no such thing as free will. We can't help what we are or what we do. It's not our fault. Nobody's to blame for anything. It's all in your background... and your glands. If you're good, that's no achievement of yours - you were lucky in your glands. If you're rotten, nobody should punish you - you were unlucky, that's all.

Ayn Rand
I write - and read - for the sake of the story... My basic test for any story is: 'Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end itself?

Ayn Rand
Compromise now, because you'll have to later, anyway, only then you'll have gone through things you'll wish you hadn't.

Ayn Rand
And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor's pocket? No, it's not as easy as that. If that were all, I'd say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren't. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.

Ayn Rand
She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness...

Ayn Rand
From the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man — the function of his reasoning mind..

Ayn Rand
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.

Ayn Rand