The only guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt.
The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They're either vicious or tragic.
The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth matching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she would have found honor in challenging; it was ineptitude—a gray spread of cot...
She was incapable of love for any object not of her own choice and she resented anyone's demand for it.
She had won the battle against her memories. But one form of torture remained, untouched by the years, the torture of the word why?
She felt a bored indifference toward the immediate world around her, toward other children and adults alike. She took it as a regrettable accident, to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened...
She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a cont...
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...
Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it
Morality is a code of black and white. When and if men attempt a compromise, it is obvious which side will necessarily lose and which will necessarily profit.
Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants.
Little notes of music trembled in hesitation, and burst, and rolled in quick, fine waves, like the thin, clear ringing of glass. Little notes leaped and exploded and laughed, laughed with a full, unco...
Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are commiting an act of virtue.
Know what you want in life and go after it. I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.
It's not just the kind of work you do; I wouldn't care, if you were an exhibitionist who's being different as a stunt, as a lark, just to attract attention to himself. It's a smart racket, to oppose t...
It's because it makes no difference to her at all whether I speak or not; as if I didn't exist and never had existed... the thing more inconceivable than one's death--never to have been born...
It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness--and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the sh...
It is not any crime you have committed that infects your soul with permanent guilt, it is none of your failures, errors or flaws, but the blank-out by which you attempt to evade them - it is not any s...
It is eminently reasonable that men should seek to associate with those who share their convictions and values. It is impossible to deal or even to communicate with men whose ideas are fundamentally o...
If you don't know, the thing to do is not to get scared, but to learn.