The Fountainhead

“It doesn’t say much. Only ‘Howard Roark, Architect.’ But it’s like those mottoes men carved over the entrance of a castle and died for. It’s a challenge in the face of something so vast and so dark, that all the pain on earth—and do you know how much suffering there is on earth?—all the pain comes from that thing you are going to face. I don’t kno

After leaving college some of his protégés did quite well, others failed. Only one committed suicide. It was said that Ellsworth Toohey had exercised a beneficent influence upon them—for they never forgot him: they came to consult him on many things, years later, they wrote him, they clung to him. They were like machines without a self-starter, tha

One can’t love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name. It’s one or the other. One doesn’t love God and sacrilege impartially. Except when one doesn’t know that sacrilege has been committed. Because one doesn’t know God.”

You’re not here. You’ve never been here. If you’d tell me that the curtains in this room are ghastly and if you’d rip them off and put up some you like—something of you would be real, here, in this room. But you never have. You’ve never told the cook what dessert you liked for dinner. You’re not here, Dominique. You’re not alive. Where’s your I?” “

When I listen to a symphony I love, I don’t get from it what the composer got. His ‘Yes’ was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience. I’m alone when I design a house, Gail, and you can never know

As long as he still feared something, he had a foothold on living; even if it meant only moving forward to an unknown disaster. The thought of death gave him nothing. The thought of living gave him a slender alms—the hint of fear.

People voiced indignant objections to his choice of architect; Jimmy uttered no word of explanation or self-defense; he said politely: “Maybe so, folks, maybe so,” and proceeded to have Roark build his station.

The Banner was permitted to strain truth, taste and credibility, but not its readers’ brain power. Its enormous headlines, glaring pictures and oversimplified text hit the senses and entered men’s consciousness without any necessity for an intermediary process of reason, like food shot through the rectum, requiring no digestion. “News,” Gail Wynand

“Speaking anatomically—and perhaps otherwise—the heart is our most valuable organ. The brain is a superstition.”

He did not smile at his employees, he did not take them out for drinks, he never inquired about their families, their love lives or their church attendance. He responded only to the essence of a man: to his creative capacity. In this office one had to be competent. There were no alternatives, no mitigating considerations. But if a man worked well,