The Fountainhead Quotes

“Can’t you ever do things without reason, just like everybody else?”

“But a desire to choose the hardest might be a confession of weakness in itself.”

“If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted—I’d have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We’re all so tied together.”

“I can’t live a life torn between that which exists—and you.”

“This is the time to merge his self in a great current, in the rising tide which is approaching to sweep us all, willing or unwilling, into the future.”

“You never wanted me to be real. You never wanted anyone to be. But you didn’t want to show it.”

“Every form of happiness is private.”

“It was a pedestal from which a god had been torn, and in his place there stood, not Satan with a sword, but a corner lout sipping a bottle of Coca-Cola.”

“Catherine had said it, he was selfish; everybody was selfish; it was not a pretty thing, to be selfish, but he was not alone in it.”

“She had not noticed him take her hand; it seemed so natural and what she had wanted from the moment of seeing him”

“She thought, I’ve learned to bear anything except happiness. I must learn how to carry it.”

“Compromise now, because you’ll have to later, anyway.”

“The senseless is the major factor in our lives.”

“Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.”

“And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor’s pocket?”

“And isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of self.”

“It’s the hardest thing in the world—to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage.”

“They were simply four people who liked being there together.”