To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I'.

The secrets of this earth are not for all men to see, but only for those who will seek them.

Peter Keating: "Do you always have to have a purpose? Do you always have to be so damn serious? Can't you ever do things without reason, just like everybody else? You're so serious, so old. Everything's important with you. Everything's great, significant in some way, every minute, even when you keep still. Can't you ever be comfortable--and unimportant?" | Howard Roark: "No."

Don't help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don't work for my happiness, my brothers—show me yours—show me that it is possible—show me your achievement—and the knowledge will give me the courage for mine. Mallory (the young artist) to Roark in "The Fountainhead"

I would step in the way of a bullet if it were aimed at my husband. It is not self-sacrifice to die protecting that which you value: If the value is great enough, you do not care to exist without it.

She knew she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.

[Roark to Keating:] If you want my advice, Peter," he said at last, "you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?"

About Mike the construction worker, friend of Roark: "He worshipped expertness of any kind. He loved his work passionately and had no tolerance for anything save for other single-track devotions. He was a master in his own filed and felt no sympathy except for mastery. His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; he was not concerned with the latter.

"There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil."

It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man's proper stature—and the rest will betray it. It is those few that move the world and give life its meaning—and it is those few that I have always sought to address. The rest are no concern of mine; it is not me or "The Fountainhead" that they will betray: it is their own souls.

Roark: "I don't make comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse to measure myself as part of anything. I'm an utter egotist.

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