Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead (1943)

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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
They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation.

Ayn Rand
There's nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we're not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.

Ayn Rand
The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.

Ayn Rand
You must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences.

Ayn Rand
Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism?

Ayn Rand
He wondered whether the peculiar solemnity of looking at the sky comes, not from what one contemplates, but from that uplift of one's head.

Ayn Rand
The Frink National Bank Building displayed the entire history of Roman art.... It offered so many columns, pediments, friezes, tripods, gladiators, urns and volutes that it looked as if it had not been built of white marble, but squeezed out of a pastry tube.

Ayn Rand
Because I never have any definite destination. This ship is not for going to places, but for getting away from them. When I stop at a port, it's only for the sheer pleasure of leaving it. I always think: here's one more place that can't hold me.

Ayn Rand
Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man.

Ayn Rand
Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched.

Ayn Rand
She stood at the window, her arms spread wide, holding on to each side of the frame, it was as if she held a piece of the city.

Ayn Rand
We are all brothers under the skin - and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.

Ayn Rand
If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others.

Ayn Rand
I want it real. I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too. Or else what is the use of seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry

Ayn Rand
To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?

Ayn Rand
Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's noble existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Ayn Rand
I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.

Ayn Rand
But a few understand that building is a great symbol we live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life.

Ayn Rand
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.

Ayn Rand
Show me your achievement — and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.

Ayn Rand
Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do.

Ayn Rand
It's so graceless, being a martyr. It's honoring your adversaries too much.

Ayn Rand
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.

Ayn Rand
Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.

Ayn Rand
When I listen to a symphony I love, I don't get from it what the composer got. His 'Yes' was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience.

Ayn Rand
She was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends.

Ayn Rand
The age of the skyscraper is gone. This is the age of the housing project. Which is always a prelude to the age of the cave.

Ayn Rand