“One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one's way to get the best for oneself.”

“One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one's own importance. There's no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes”

“If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others.”

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

“I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom. . .To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.”

“People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.”

“Compassion is a wonderful thing. It's what one feels when one looks at a squashed caterpillar. An elevating experience. One can let oneself go and spread--you know, like taking a girdle off. You don't have to hold your stomach, your heart or your spirit up--when you feel compassion. All you have to do is look down. It's much easier. When you look up, you get a pain in the neck. Compassion is the greatest virtue. It justifies suffering. There's got to be suffering in the world, else how would we be virtuous and feel compassion?... Oh, it has an antithesis--but such a hard, demanding one... Admiration, Mrs. Jones, admiration. But that takes more than a girdle... So I say that anyone for whom we can't feel sorry is a vicious person. Like Howard Roark.”