The Fountainhead quotes...part 2

This is the second part of my favorite quotes from the Fountainhead....The quotes have been typed from the book and this is my attempt to pay a tribute to Ayn Rand.

Here they come.........


Peter: "Where’s your I?"
"Where’s yours, Peter?" she asked quietly.


Dominique: 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. Usually in the more vulgar kind of hotels. Reflections of reflections and echoes of echoes. No beginning and no end. No center and no purpose


Dominique: Only I can do nothing halfway. Those who can, have a fissure somewhere inside. Most people have many. They lie to themselves--not to know that. I’ve never lied to myself. So I had to do what you all do--only consistently and completely.



Dominique: "It’s said that the worst thing one can do to a man is to kill his self-respect.But that’s not true. Self-respect is something that can’t be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man’s pretense at it."



Gail to Peter: "It’s extremely cruel to be honest."



"the person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him."



Gail: "I mean the person who has the filthy insolence to claim that he loves equally the man who made that statue of you and the man who makes a Mickey Mouse balloon to sell on street corners. I mean the person who loves the men who prefer the Mickey Mouse to your statue--and there are many of that kind. I mean the person who loves Joan of Arc and the salesgirls in dress shops on Broadway--with an equal fervor. I mean the person who loves your beauty and the women he sees in a subway--the kind that can’t cross their knees and show flesh hanging publicly over their garters--with the same sense of exaltation. I mean the person who loves the clean, steady, unfrightened eyes of man looking through a telescope
and the white stare of an imbecile--equally, I mean quite a large, generous, magnanimous company




Dominique: -that love is forgiveness?"
Gail: "I’ll say it’s an indecency of which you’re not capable--even though you think you’re an expert in such matters."



Gail: "That love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don’t know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who’ve never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you’ve felt what it means to love as you and I know it--the total passion for the total height--you’re incapable of anything less."



Dominique: "You’ve never felt how small you were when looking at the ocean."
Gail: "Never. Nor looking at the planets. Nor at mountain peaks. Nor at the Grand Canyon. Why should I? When I look at the ocean, I feel the greatness of man, I think of man’s magnificent capacity that created this ship to conquer all that senseless space. When I look at mountain peaks, I think of tunnels and dynamite. When I look at the planets, I think of airplanes."


Gail to Dominique: "It’s interesting to speculate on the reasons that make men so anxious to debase themselves. As in that idea of feeling small before nature. It’s not a bromide, it’s practically an institution. Have you noticed how self-righteous a man sounds when he tells you about it? Look, he seems to say, I’m so glad to be a pygmy, that’s how virtuous I am. Have you heard with what delight people quote some great celebrity who’s proclaimed that he’s not so great when he looks at Niagara Falls? It’s as if they were smacking their lips in sheer glee that their best is dust before the brute force of an earthquake. As if they were sprawling on all fours, rubbing their foreheads in the mud to the majesty of a hurricane. But that’s not the spirit that leashed fire, steam, electricity, that crossed oceans in sailing sloops, that built airplanes and dams...and skyscrapers. What is it they fear? What is they hate so much, those who love to crawl? And why?"


Mallory To Austen Heller: "I often think that he’s the only one of us who’s achieved immortality. I don’t mean in the sense of fame and I don’t mean that he won’t die some day. But he’s living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them,they’re not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict--and they call it growth. At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment?


Mallory to Roark: "It’s not his popularity.It’s the special nature of it. You can’t fight him on his terms. You’re only a tank--and that’s a very clean, innocent weapon. An honest weapon that goes first, out in front, and mows everything down or takes every counterblow. He’s a corrosive gas. The kind that eats lungs out. I think there really is a secret to the core of evil and he has it. I don’t know what it is. I know how he uses it and what he’s after."



Roark to Mallory: "When will you stop thinking about that? About the world and me? When will you learn to forget it? "


It takes two to make a very great career: the man who is great, and the man--almost rarer--who is great enough to see greatness and say so."


"No. Only I don’t feel helpless as a rule."


Roark: "No. I hate incompetence. I think it’s probably the only thing I do hate. But it didn’t make me want to rule people. Nor to teach them anything. It made me want to do my own work in my own way and let myself be torn to pieces if necessary."


Roark to Gail: "What you feel in the presence of a thing you admire is just one word--’Yes.’ The affirmation, the acceptance, the sign of admittance. And that ’Yes’ is more than an answer to one thing, it’s a kind of ’Amen’ to life, to the earth that holds this thing, to the thought that created it, to yourself for being able to see it. But the ability to say ’Yes’ or ’No’ is the essence of all ownership. It’s your ownership of your own ego. Your soul, if you wish. Your soul has a single basic function--the act of valuing. ’Yes’ or ’No,’ ’I wish’ or ’I do not wish.’ You can’t say ’Yes’ without saying ’I.’ There’s no affirmation without the one who affirms. In this sense, everything to which you grant your love is yours."



Roark to Gail: "I’ve always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place.


Conversation between Roark and Gail: "I was thinking of people who say that happiness is impossible on earth. Look how hard they all try to find some joy in life. Look how they struggle for it. Why should any living creature exist in pain? By what conceivable right can anyone demand that a human being exist for anything but his own joy? Every one of them wants it. Every part of him wants it. But they never find it. I wonder why. They whine and say they don’t understand the meaning of life. There’s a particular kind of people that I despise. 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."
"Look, Gail." Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. "Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That’s the meaning of life."
"Your strength?"
"Your work." He tossed the branch aside. "The material the earth offers you and what you make of it...


Peter: "Howard--anything you ask. Anything. I’d sell my soul..."
Roark: "That’s the sort of thing I want you to understand. To sell your soul is
easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul--would you understand why that’s much harder?"


Roark: "Why, no. I’m too conceited. If you want to call it that. I don’t makecomparisons. 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."


(this line is from the paragrapgh when Roark feels pity for Peter....the feeling mentioned here is PITY) He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.


Roark: "In the exact way. I don’t wish to be the symbol of anything. I’m only myself."


The complete conversation between Howard and Gail defining the second hander

Roark to Gail: "I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I’ve always demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I’ve always recognized it at once--and it’s the only quality I respect in men. I chose my friends by that. Now I know what it is. A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters."

Roark to Gail: I even admit that I love them. But I couldn’t love them if they were my chief reason for living. Do you notice that Peter Keating hasn’t a single friend left? Do you see why? If one doesn’t respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others."


Roark to Gail: "......if this boat were sinking, I’d give my life to save you. Not because it’s any kind of duty. Only because I like you, for reasons and standards of my own. I could die for you. But I couldn’t and wouldn’t live for you."

and ofcourse....the testimony of Roark.


i am currently reading atlas shrugged.....want to finish it as soon as possible and post some of the quotes just like this....