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Fountainhead QUOTES

Fountainhead QUOTES

1 " Lois Cook said that words must be freed from the oppression of reason. She said the stranglehold of reason upon words is like the exploitation of the masses by the capitalists. Words must be permitted to negotiate with reason through collective bargaining. That’s what she said. She’s so amusing and refreshing. "

― Ayn Rand , Fountainhead

2 " Every man creates his meaning and form and goal. Why is it so important--what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right--so long as it’s not yourself? "

― Ayn Rand , Fountainhead

3 " So after centuries of being pounded with the doctrine that altruism is the ultimate ideal, men have accepted it in the only way it could be accepted. By seeking self-esteem through others. By living second-hand. And it has opened the way for every kind of horror. It has become the dreadful form of selfishness which a truly selfish man couldn’t have conceived. And now, to cure a world perishing from selflessness, we’re asked to destroy the self. "

― Ayn Rand , Fountainhead

4 " People want nothing but mirrors around them. To reflect them while they're reflecting too. You know, like the senseless infinity you get from two mirrors facing each other across a narrow passage. [...] Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. "

― Ayn Rand , Fountainhead

5 " 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. "

― Ayn Rand , Fountainhead

6 " The people had come to witness a sensational case, to see celebrities, to get material for conversation, to be seen, to kill time. They would return to unwanted jobs, unloved families, unchosen friends, to drawing rooms, evening clothes, cocktail glasses and movies, to unadmitted pain, murdered hope, desire left unreached, left hanging silently over a path on which no step was taken, to days of effort not to think, not to say, to forget and give in and give up. "

― Ayn Rand , Fountainhead

7 " Those who seek some sort of a higher purpose or ’universal goal,’ who don’t know what to live for, who moan that they must ’find themselves.’ You hear it all around us. That seems to be the official bromide of our century. Every book you open. Every drooling self-confession. It seems to be the noble thing to confess. I’d think it would be the most shameful one. "

― Ayn Rand , Fountainhead

8 " He thought that exaltation comes from the consciousness of being guiltless, of seeing the truth and achieving it, of living up to one’s highest possibility, of knowing no shame and having no cause for shame, of being able to stand naked in full sunlight. He thought that exaltation means joy and that joy is man’s birthright. He thought that a place built as a setting for man is a sacred place. "

― Ayn Rand , Fountainhead