“For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.”

“I am older than you. Believe me, there is no other way to live on earth. Men are not open to truth or reason. They cannot be reached by a rational argument. The mind is powerless against them. Yet we have to deal with them. If we want to accomplish anything, we have to deceive them into letting us accomplish it. Or force them. They understand nothing else. We cannot expect their support for any endeavor of the intellect, for any goal of the spirit. They are nothing but vicious animals. They are greedy, self-indulgent, predatory dollar-chasers”

“A “collective” mind does not exist. It is merely the sum of endless numbers of individual minds. If we have an endless number of individual minds who are weak, meek, submissive and impotent – who renounce their creative supremacy for the sake of the “whole” and accept humbly that the “whole’s” verdict – we don’t get a collective super-brain. We get only the weak, meek, submissive and impotent collective mind.”

“When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.”

“You know that I hate you, Roark. I hate you for what you are, for wanting you, for having to want you. I'm going to fight you-and I'm going to destroy you-and I tell you this as calmly as I told you that I'm a begging animal. I'm going to pray that you can't be destroyed-I tell you this, too-even though I believe in nothing and have nothing to pray to. But I will fight to block every step you take. I will fight to tear every chance you want away from you. I will hurt you through the only thing that can hurt you-through your work. I will fight to starve you, to strangle you on the things you won't be able to reach. I have done it to you to today-and that is why I shall sleep with you tonight. Part 2, Chapter 7, pg. 272-3 The Fountainhead”

“These are the things before me. And as I stand here at the door of glory, I look behind me for the last time. I look upon the history of men, which I have learned from the books, and I wonder. It was a long story, and the spirit which moved it was the spirit of man’s freedom. But what is freedom? Freedom from what? There is nothing to take a man’s freedom away from him, save other men. To be free, a man must be free of his brothers. That is freedom. This and nothing else.”

“I like to receive money for my work. But I can pass that up this time. I like to have people know my work is done by me. But I can pass that up. I like to have tenants made happy by my work. But that doesn't matter too much. The only thing that matters, my goal, my reward, my beginning, my end is the work itself. My work done my way. Peter, there's nothing in the world that you can offer me, except this. Offer me this and you can have anything I've got to give. My work done my way. A private, personal, selfish, egotistical motivation. That's the only way I function. That's all I am.”