The basic trouble with the modern world … is the intellectual fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. To solve the gigantic problems crushing the world today, we must clarify our mental con...
She watched the prairies the rivers, the towns slipping past at an untouchable distance below - and she noted that the sense of detachment one feels when looking at the earth from a plane was the same...
She thought: at this moment, the glass stem between his fingers feels just like the one between mine. We have this much in common.
She survived it. She was able to survive it, because she did not believe in suffering. She faced with astonished indignation the ugly fact of feeling pain, and refused to let it matter. Suffering was...
She stood, in a room of crumbling plaster, pressed to the window-pane, looking up at the unattainable form of everything she loved. She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that n...
She sat at the window of the train....The window frame trembled with the speed of the motion, the pane hung over empty darkness, and dots of light slashed across the glass as luminous streaks, once in...
She knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness, yet they could let each other see it without the need of protection.
Self respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it.
Rules? said Roark. Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same p...
Our name is Equality 7-2521, as it is written on the iron bracelet which all men wear on their left wrists with their names upon it. We are twenty-one years old. We are six feet tall, and this is a bu...
Our dearest one. Fear nothing of the forest. There is no danger in solitude. We have no need of our brothers. Let us forget their good and our evil, let us forget all things save that we are together...
Observe the nature of today’s alleged peace movements. Professing love and concern for the survival of mankind, they keep screaming that the nuclear-weapons race should be stopped, that armed force sh...
My dearest one, it is not proper for men to be without names. There was a time when each man had a name of his own to distinguish him from all other men. So let us choose our names. I have read of a m...
Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent.
Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who pro...
Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. The mind is an attribute of the individual.The basic need of the creator is independence. The reaso...
Love is reverence, worship, glory, and the upward glance. But they don’t know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who’ve never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out o...
Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what...
Look, Gail. Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the bran...
Kira, the highest thing in man is not his god. It's that in him which knows the reverence due a god. And you, Kira, are my highest reverence...