Quotes from book

The Fountainhead

“I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you.”

“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.”

“The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody has decided not to see.”

“This is pity,” he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.”

“Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.”

“A quest for self-respect is proof of its lack”

“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.”

“Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don’t ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul.”

“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.”

“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.”

“How do you always manage to decide?"
"How can you let others decide for you?”

“Self respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it.”

“Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are commiting an act of virtue.”

“There is no affirmation without the one who affirms. in this sense, everything to which you grant your love is yours”

“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.”

“She thought how strange it would be if she ever said 'Hello' to him. One did not greet oneself each morning.”

“Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.”

“No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.”

“What in hell are you really made of, Howard? After all, it's only a building. It's not the combination of holy sacrament, Indian torture, and sexual ecstasy that you seem to make of it."
"Isn't it?”