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kkintle · 2 years

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The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand; Quotes

Romanticism is the conceptual school of art. It deals, not with the random trivia of the day, but with the timeless, fundamental, universal problems and values of human existence. It does not record or photograph; it creates and projects. It is concerned--in the words of Aristotle--not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be.

In a play I wrote in my early thirties, Ideal, the heroine, a screen star, speaks for me when she says: "I want to see, real, living, and in the hours of my own days, that glory I create as an illusion. I want it real. I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too. Or else what is the use of seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry."

I felt so profound an indignation at the state of "things as they are" that it seemed as if I would never regain the energy to move one step farther toward "things as they ought to be." Frank talked to me for hours, that night. He convinced me of why one cannot give up the world to those one despises.

The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man's highest potential and strive to actualize it. The man-haters are those who regard man as a helpless, depraved, contemptible creature--and struggle never to let him discover otherwise. It is important here to remember that the only direct, introspective knowledge of man anyone possesses is of himself.

"It is not the works, but the belief which is here decisive and determines the order of rank--to employ once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper meaning,--it is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost.--The noble soul has reverence for itself.--" (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.)

It is not in the nature of man--nor of any living entity--to start out by giving up, by spitting in one's own face and damning existence; that requires a process of corruption whose rapidity differs from man to man. Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it. Then all of these vanish in the vast swamp of their elders who tell them persistently that maturity consists of abandoning one's mind; security, of abandoning one's values; practicality, of losing self-esteem. Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that that fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose and reality. But whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential.

He stood looking at her. She knew that he did not see her. No, she thought, it was not that exactly. He always looked straight at people and his damnable eyes never missed a thing, it was only that he made people feel as if they did not exist.

"Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?" "Yes." "My dear fellow, who will let you?" "That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?"

"Rules?" said Roark. "Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it."

Every form has its own meaning. 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? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic--and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else? There must be some reason. I don't know. I've never known it. I'd like to understand."

"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?" "You see, that's what I admire about you, Howard. You always know."

"But I mean it. How do you always manage to decide?" "How can you let others decide for you?"

'Choose the builder of your home as carefully as you choose the bride to inhabit it.'"

He demanded of all people the one thing he had never granted anybody: obedience.

Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake: he loved his work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost.

"It's the critic's job to interpret the artist, Mr. Francon, even to the artist himself.”

"But, you see, it's not what you do that matters really. It's only you." "Me what?" "Just you here. Or you in the city. Or you somewhere in the world. I don't know. Just that."

"It's all right, dear. I understand." "If you did, you'd call me the names I deserve and make me stop it." "No, Peter. I don't want to change you. I love you, Peter." "God help you!" "I know that." "You know that? And you say it like this? Like you'd say, 'Hello, it's a beautiful evening'?" "Well, why not? Why worry about it? I love you."

"When we gaze at the magnificence of an ancient monument and ascribe its achievement to one man, we are guilty of spiritual embezzlement. We forget the army of craftsmen, unknown and unsung, who preceded him in the darkness of the ages, who toiled humbly--all heroism is humble--each contributing his small share to the common treasure of his time. A great building is not the private invention of some genius or other. It is merely a condensation of the spirit of a people."

"You want to know why I'm doing it?" Roark smiled, without resentment or interest. "Is that it? I'll tell you, if you want to know. I don't give a damn where I work next. There's no architect in town that I'd want to work for. But I have to work somewhere, so it might as well be your Francon--if I can get what I want from you. I'm selling myself, and I'll play the game that way--for the time being."

"The public taste and the public heart are the final criteria of the artist. The genius is the one who knows how to express the general. The exception is to tap the unexceptional."

Roark knew what to expect of his job. He would never see his work erected, only pieces of it, which he preferred not to see; but he would be free to design as he wished and he would have the experience of solving actual problems. It was less than he wanted and more than he could expect. He accepted it at that.

RALSTON HOLCOMBE had no visible neck, but his chin took care of that.

"Is that what you really think of them?" "Not at all. But I don't like people who try to say only what they think I think."

That's the way everybody does it. You see?" "Yes." "Then you agree?" "No."

"Listen. Roark, won't you please listen?" "I'll listen if you want me to, Mr. Snyte. But I think I should tell you now that nothing you can say will make any difference. If you don't mind that, I don't mind listening."

"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 know what it is, I don't know why it should be unleashed against you. I know only that it will be. And I know that if you carry these words through to the end, it will be a victory, Howard, not just for you, but for something that should win, that moves the world--and never wins acknowledgment. It will vindicate so many who have fallen before you, who have suffered as you will suffer. May God bless you--or whoever it is that is alone to see the best, the highest possible to human hearts. You're on your way into hell, Howard."

"Mike, how did you get here? Why such a come-down?" He had never known Mike to bother with small private residences. "Don't play the sap. You know how I got here. You didn't think I'd miss it, your first house, did you? And you think it's a come-down? Well, maybe it is. And maybe it's the other way around." Roark extended his hand and Mike's grimy fingers closed about it ferociously, as if the smudges he left implanted in Roark's skin said everything he wanted to say. And because he was afraid that he might say it, Mike growled: "Run along, boss, run along. Don't clog up the works like that."

"They're true, though, both sides of it, aren't they?" "Oh, sure, but couldn't you have reversed the occasions when you chose to express them?" "There wouldn't have been any point in that." "Was there any in what you've done?" "No. None at all. But it amused me." "I can't figure you out, Dominique. You've done it before. You go along so beautifully, you do brilliant work and just when you're about to make a real step forward--you spoil it by pulling something like this. Why?" "Perhaps that is precisely why." "Will you tell me--as a friend, because I like you and I'm interested in you--what are you really after?" "I should think that's obvious. I'm after nothing at all." He spread his hands open, shrugging helplessly. She smiled gaily.

"You know, Alvah, it would be terrible if I had a job I really wanted." "Well, of all things! Well, of all fool things to say! What do you mean?" "Just that. That it would be terrible to have a job I enjoyed and did not want to lose." "Why?" "Because I would have to depend on you – (…)

"It's not only that, Alvah. It's not you alone. 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. We're all in a net, the net is waiting, and we're pushed into it by one single desire. You want a thing and it's precious to you. Do you know who is standing ready to tear it out of your hands? You can't know, it may be so involved and so far away, but someone is ready, and you're afraid of them all. And you cringe and you crawl and you beg and you accept them--just so they'll let you keep it. And look at whom you come to accept." "If I'm correct in gathering that you're criticizing mankind in general..." "You know, it's such a peculiar thing--our idea of mankind in general. We all have a sort of vague, glowing picture when we say that, something solemn, big and important. But actually all we know of it is the people we meet in our lifetime. Look at them. Do you know any you'd feel big and solemn about?"

As a matter of fact, one can feel some respect for people when they suffer. They have a certain dignity. But have you ever looked at them when they're enjoying themselves? That's when you see the truth.Look at those who spend the money they've slaved for--at amusement parks and side shows. Look at those who're rich and have the whole world open to them. Observe what they pick out for enjoyment. Watch them in the smarter speak-easies. That's your mankind in general. I don't want to touch it." "But hell! That's not the way to look at it. That's not the whole picture. There's some good in the worst of us. There's always a redeeming feature." "So much the worse. Is it an inspiring sight to see a man commit a heroic gesture, and then learn that he goes to vaudeville shows for relaxation? Or see a man who's painted a magnificent canvas--and learn that he spends his time sleeping with every slut he meets?" "What do you want? Perfection?" "--or nothing. So, you see, I take the nothing." "That doesn't make sense." "I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom." "You call that freedom?" "To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing." "What if you found something you wanted?" "I won't find it. I won't choose to see it. It would be part of that lovely world of yours. I'd have to share it with all the rest of you--and I wouldn't. You know, I never open again any great book I've read and loved. It hurts me to think of the other eyes that have read it and of what they were. Things like that can't be shared. Not with people like that." "Dominique, it's abnormal to feel so strongly about anything." "That's the only way I can feel. Or not at all."

I had a terrible time getting it--it wasn't for sale, of course. I think I was in love with it, Alvah. I brought it home with me." "Where is it? I'd like to see something you like, for a change." "It's broken." "Broken? A museum piece? How did that happen?" "I broke it." "How?" "I threw it down the air shaft. There's a concrete floor below." "Are you totally crazy? Why?" "So that no one else would ever see it."

"I'm sorry, darling. I didn't want to shock you. I thought I could speak to you because you're the one person who's impervious to any sort of shock. I shouldn't have. It's no use, I guess."

"Pretty near the top? Is that what you think? If I can't be the very best, if I can't be the one architect of this country in my day--I don't want any damn part of it!" "Ah, but one doesn't get to that, Peter, by falling down on the job. One doesn't get to be first in anything without the strength to make some sacrifices." "But..." "Your life doesn't belong to you, Peter, if you're really aiming high.”

"You must learn how to handle people." "I can't." "Why?" "I don't know how. I was born without some one particular sense." "It's something one acquires." "I have no organ to acquire it with. I don't know whether it's something I lack, or something extra I have that stops me. Besides, I don't like people who have to be handled."

"That you didn't ask me to tell you what you are as I see you. Anybody else would have." "I'm sorry. It wasn't indifference. You're one of the few friends I want to keep. I just didn't think of asking." "I know you didn't. That's the point. You're a self-centered monster, Howard. The more monstrous because you're utterly innocent about it." "That's true." "You should show a little concern when you admit that." "Why?" "You know, there's a thing that stumps me. You're the coldest man I know. And I can't understand why--knowing that you're actually a fiend in your quiet sort of way--why I always feel, when I see you, that you're the most life-giving person I've ever met."

"Don't you see?" Roark was saying. "It's a monument you want to build, but not to yourself. Not to your own life or your own achievement. To other people. To their supremacy over you. You're not challenging that supremacy. You're immortalizing it. You haven't thrown it off--you're putting it up forever. Will you be happy if you seal yourself for the rest of your life in that borrowed shape? Or if you strike free, for once, and build a new house, your own? You don't want the Randolph place. You want what it stood for. But what it stood for is what you've fought all your life."

"but I guess that's what the public wants." "Why do you suppose they want it?" "I don't know." "Then why should you care what they want?" "You've got to consider the public." "Don't you know that most people take most things because that's what's given them, and they have no opinion whatever? Do you wish to be guided by what they expect you to think they think or by your own judgment?" "You can't force it down their throats." "You don't have to. You must only be patient. Because on your side you have reason--oh, I know, it's something no one really wants to have on his side--and against you, you have just a vague, fat, blind inertia." "Why do you think that I don't want reason on my side?" "It's not you, Mr. Janss. It's the way most people feel. They have to take a chance, everything they do is taking a chance, but they feel so much safer when they take it on something they know to be ugly, vain and stupid." "That's true, you know," said Mr. Janss.

Francon felt nothing but relief. "We knew he would, sooner or later," said Francon. "Why regret that he spared himself and all of us a prolonged agony?"

He understood that it was a confession, that answer of his, and a terrifying one. He did not know the nature of what he had confessed and he felt certain that Roark did not know it either. But the thing had been bared; they could not grasp it, but they felt its shape. And it made them sit silently, facing each other, in astonishment, in resignation. "Pull yourself together, Peter," said Roark gently, as to a comrade. "We'll never speak of that again."

Sometimes, not often, he sat up and did not move for a long time; then he smiled, the slow smile of an executioner watching a victim. He thought of his days going by, of the buildings he could have been doing, should have been doing and, perhaps, never would be doing again. He watched the pain's unsummoned appearance with a cold, detached curiosity; he said to himself: Well, here it is again. He waited to see how long it would last. It gave him a strange, hard pleasure to watch his fight against it, and he could forget that it was his own suffering; he could smile in contempt, not realizing that he smiled at his own agony. Such moments were rare. But when they came, he felt as he did in the quarry: that he had to drill through granite, that he had to drive a wedge and blast the thing within him which persisted in calling to his pity.

"I don't know what you're talking about." "If you didn't, you'd be much more astonished and much less angry, Miss Francon."

She had lost the freedom she loved. She knew that a continuous struggle against the compulsion of a single desire was compulsion also, but it was the form she preferred to accept. It was the only manner in which she could let him motivate her life. She found a dark satisfaction in pain--because that pain came from him.

He went to the quarry and he worked that day as usual. She did not come to the quarry and he did not expect her to come. But the thought of her remained. He watched it with curiosity. It was strange to be conscious of another person's existence, to feel it as a close, urgent necessity; a necessity without qualifications, neither pleasant nor painful, merely final like an ultimatum. It was important to know that she existed in the world; it was important to think of her, of how she had awakened this morning, of how she moved, with her body still his, now his forever, of what she thought.

She had not given him the one answer that would have saved her: an answer of simple revulsion--she had found joy in her revulsion, in her terror and in his strength. That was the degradation she had wanted and she hated him for it.

"Oh, not at all...." She walked away. She would not ask for his name. It was her last chance of freedom. She walked swiftly, easily, in sudden relief. She wondered why she had never noticed that she did not know his name and why she had never asked him. Perhaps because she had known everything she had to know about him from that first glance. She thought, one could not find some nameless worker in the city of New York. She was safe. If she knew his name, she would be on her way to New York now.

"If you must feel--no, not gratitude, gratitude is such an embarrassing word--but, shall we say, appreciation?"

When one makes enemies one knows that one's dangerous where it's necessary to be dangerous.

He could not identify the quality of the feeling; but he knew that part of it was a sense of shame. Once, he confessed it to Ellsworth Toohey. Toohey laughed. "That's good for you, Peter. One must never allow oneself to acquire an exaggerated sense of one's own importance. There's no necessity to burden oneself with absolutes."

"No. I don't fit, Ellsworth. Do I?" "I could, of course, ask: Into what? But supposing I don't ask it. Supposing I just say that people who don't fit have their uses also, as well as those who do? Would you like that better? Of course, the simplest thing to say is that I've always been a great admirer of yours and always will be." "That's not a compliment."

"Had I known that you were interested, I would have sent you a very special invitation." "But you didn't think I'd be interested?" "No, frankly, I..." "That was a mistake, Ellsworth. You discounted my newspaperwoman's instinct. Never miss a scoop. It's not often that one has the chance to witness the birth of a felony."

"Oh, I haven't been anywhere for a long time and I decided to start in with that. You know, when I go swimming I don't like to torture myself getting into cold water by degrees. I dive right in and it's a nasty shock, but after that the rest is not so hard to take."

"You did want me, Dominique?" "I thought I could never want anything and you suited that so well."

He did not think of Dominique often, but when he did, the thought was not a sudden recollection, it was the acknowledgment of a continuous presence that needed no acknowledgment.

"You're unpredictable enough even to be sensible at times.”

"Well, what a quaint idea! I don't know whether it's horrible or very wise indeed." "Both, Mrs. Gillespie. As all wisdom."

"You're wrong about Austen, Mr. Roark. He's very successful. In his profession and mine you're successful if it leaves you untouched." "How does one achieve that?" "In one of two ways: by not looking at people at all or by looking at everything about them."

"Which is preferable, Miss Francon?" "Whichever is hardest." "But a desire to choose the hardest might be a confession of weakness in itself." "Of course, Mr. Roark. But it's the least offensive form of confession." "If the weakness is there to be confessed at all."

There's nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because, in that glance, we know everything. Even though we're not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge. Have you ever thought about the style of a soul, Kiki?"

“....I think, Kiki, that every human soul has a style of its own, also. Its one basic theme. You'll see it reflected in every thought, every act, every wish of that person. The one absolute, the one imperative in that living creature. Years of studying a man won't show it to you. His face will. You'd have to write volumes to describe a person. Think of his face. You need nothing else." "That sounds fantastic, Ellsworth. And unfair, if true. It would leave people naked before you." "It's worse than that. It also leaves you naked before them. You betray yourself by the manner in which you react to a certain face. To a certain kind of face....The style of your soul...There's nothing important on earth, except human beings. There's nothing as important about human beings as their relations to one another...."

"And that was the famous Toohey technique. Never place your punch at the beginning of a column nor at the end. Sneak it in where it's least expected. Fill a whole column with drivel, just to get in that one important line." He bowed courteously. "Quite. That's why I like to talk to you. It's such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don't even know that you're being subtle and vicious.”

“All things are simple when you reduce them to fundamentals. You'd be surprised if you knew how few fundamentals there are. Only two, perhaps. To explain all of us. It's the untangling, the reducing that's difficult--that's why people don't like to bother. I don't think they'd like the results, either."

"Roark, everything I've done all my life is because it's the kind of a world that made you work in a quarry last summer." "I know that."

We are glad to listen to the sublime, but it's not necessary to be too damn reverent about the sublime.

"What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Ellsworth asked: "Then in order to be truly wealthy, a man should collect souls?" The teacher was about to ask him what the hell did he mean, but controlled himself and asked what did he mean. Ellsworth would not elucidate.

He was polite, not in the manner of one seeking favor, but in the manner of one granting it.

“You're much too tense and passionate about it. A hysterical devotion to one's career does not make for happiness or success. It is wiser to select a profession about which you can be calm, sane and matter-of-fact. Yes, even if you hate it. It makes for down-to-earthness."

The young photographer glanced at Roark's face--and thought of something that had puzzled him for a long time: he had always wondered why the sensations one felt in dreams were so much more intense than anything one could experience in waking reality--why the horror was so total and the ecstasy so complete--and what was that extra quality which could never be recaptured afterward; the quality of what he felt when he walked down a path through tangled green leaves in a dream, in an air full of expectation, of causeless, utter rapture--and when he awakened he could not explain it, it had been just a path through some woods.The young photographer glanced at Roark's face--and thought of something that had puzzled him for a long time: he had always wondered why the sensations one felt in dreams were so much more intense than anything one could experience in waking reality--why the horror was so total and the ecstasy so complete--and what was that extra quality which could never be recaptured afterward; the quality of what he felt when he walked down a path through tangled green leaves in a dream, in an air full of expectation, of causeless, utter rapture--and when he awakened he could not explain it, it had been just a path through some woods.

"Of course I need you. I go insane when I see you. You can do almost anything you wish with me. Is that what you want to hear? Almost, Dominique. And the things you couldn't make me do--you could put me through hell if you demanded them and I had to refuse you, as I would. Through utter hell, Dominique. Does that please you? Why do you want to know whether you own me? It's so simple. Of course you do. All of me that can be owned. You'll never demand anything else. But you want to know whether you could make me suffer. You could. What of it?" The words did not sound like surrender, because they were not torn out of him, but admitted simply and willingly. She felt no thrill of conquest; she felt herself owned more than ever, by a man who could say these things, know of them to be true, and still remain controlled and controlling--as she wanted him to remain.

“Do you think integrity is the monopoly of the artist? And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor's pocket? No, it's not as easy as that. If that were all, I'd say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren't. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something one doesn't borrow or pawn. And yet, if I were asked to choose a symbol for humanity as we know it, I wouldn't choose a cross nor an eagle nor a lion and unicorn. I'd choose three gilded balls."

"Don't worry. They're all against me. But I have one advantage: they don't know what they want. I do."

The point I wish to make is only that one must mistrust one's most personal impulses. What one desires is actually of so little importance! One can't expect to find happiness until one realizes this completely.

"You said something yesterday about a first law. A law demanding that man seek the best....It was funny....The unrecognized genius--that's an old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one--the genius recognized too well?...That a great many men are poor fools who can't see the best--that's nothing. One can't get angry at that. But do you understand about the men who see it and don't want it?"

You'll say it doesn't make sense? Of course it doesn't. That's why it works. Reason can be fought with reason. How are you going to fight the unreasonable? The trouble with you, my dear, and with most people, is that you don't have sufficient respect for the senseless. The senseless is the major factor in our lives. You have no chance if it is your enemy. But if you can make it become your ally--ah, my dear!...

Don't you find it interesting to see a huge, complicated piece of machinery, such as our society, all levers and belts and interlocking gears, the kind that looks as if one would need an army to operate it--and you find that by pressing your little finger against one spot, the one vital spot, the center of all its gravity, you can make the thing crumble into a worthless heap of scrap iron? It can be done, my dear. But it takes a long time.

Hell, what's the use of accomplishing a skillful piece of work if nobody knows that you've accomplished it? Had you been your old self, you'd tell me, at this point, that that is the psychology of a murderer who's committed the perfect crime and then confesses because he can't bear the idea that nobody knows it's a perfect crime. And I'd answer that you're right. I want an audience. That's the trouble with victims--they don't even know they're victims, which is as it should be, but it does become monotonous and takes half the fun away. You're such a rare treat--a victim who can appreciate the artistry of its own execution....

He wouldn't even give you that, not even understanding, not even enough to...respect you a little just the same. I don't see what's so wrong with trying to please people. I don't see what's wrong with wanting to be friendly and liked and popular. Why is that a crime? Why should anyone sneer at you for that, sneer all the time, all the time, day and night, not giving you a moment's peace, like the Chinese water torture, you know where they drop water on your skull drop by drop?"

“When you see a man casting pearls without getting even a pork chop in return--it is not against the swine that you feel indignation. It is against the man who valued his pearls so little that he was willing to fling them into the muck and to let them become the occasion for a whole concert of grunting, transcribed by the court stenographer."

“Ask anything of men. Ask them to achieve wealth, fame, love, brutality, murder, self-sacrifice. But don't ask them to achieve self-respect. They will hate your soul. Well, they know best. They must have their reasons. They won't say, of course, that they hate you. They will say that you hate them. It's near enough, I suppose. They know the emotion involved. Such are men as they are. So what is the use of being a martyr to the impossible? What is the use of building for a world that does not exist?"

Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are committing an act of virtue. Let us say that we are moles and we object to mountain peaks. Or, perhaps, that we are lemmings, the animals who cannot help swimming out to self-destruction. I realize fully that at this moment I am as futile as Howard Roark. This is my Stoddard Temple--my first and my last." She inclined her head to the judge. "That is all, Your Honor."

“Remembering that you attach such great importance to not being beaten except by your own hand, I thought you would enjoy this."

"So you people made a martyr out of me, after all. And that is the one thing I've tried all my life not to be. It's so graceless, being a martyr. It's honoring your adversaries too much. But I'll tell you this, Alvah--I'll tell it to you, because I couldn't find a less appropriate person to hear it: nothing that you do to me--or to him--will be worse than what I'll do myself. If you think I can't take the Stoddard Temple, wait till you see what I can take."

"I've been so busy...No, that's not quite true. I've had the time, but when I came home I just couldn't make myself do anything, I just fell in bed and went to sleep. Uncle Ellsworth, do people sleep a lot because they're tired or because they want to escape from something?"

“....But the poor don't hate us, as they should. They only despise us....You know, it's funny: it's the masters who despise the slaves, and the slaves who hate the masters. I don't know who is which. Maybe it doesn't fit here. Maybe it does. I don't know..."

"Don't you see how selfish you have been? You chose a noble career, not for the good you could accomplish, but for the personal happiness you expected to find in it." "But I really wanted to help people." "Because you thought you'd be good and virtuous doing it." "Why--yes. Because I thought it was right. Is it vicious to want to do right?" "Yes, if it's your chief concern. Don't you see how egotistical it is? To hell with everybody so long as I'm virtuous." "But if you have no...no self-respect, how can you be anything?" "Why must you be anything?" She spread her hands out, bewildered. "If your first concern is for what you are or think or feel or have or haven't got--you're still a common egotist." "But I can't jump out of my own body." "No. But you can jump out of your narrow soul." "You mean, I must want to be unhappy?" "No. You must stop wanting anything. You must forget how important Miss Catherine Halsey is. Because, you see, she isn't. Men are important only in relation to other men, in their usefulness, in the service they render. Unless you understand that completely, you can expect nothing but one form of misery or another. Why make such a cosmic tragedy out of the fact that you've found yourself feeling cruel toward people? So what? It's just growing pains. One can't jump from a state of animal brutality into a state of spiritual living without certain transitions. And some of them may seem evil. A beautiful woman is usually a gawky adolescent first. All growth demands destruction. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You must be willing to suffer, to be cruel, to be dishonest, to be unclean--anything, my dear, anything to kill the most stubborn of roots, the ego. And only when it is dead, when you care no longer, when you have lost your identity and forgotten the name of your soul--only then will you know the kind of happiness I spoke about, and the gates of spiritual grandeur will fall open before you."

They stood silently before each other for a moment, and she thought that the most beautiful words were those which were not needed.

"Roark, before I met you, I had always been afraid of seeing someone like you, because I knew that I'd also have to see what I saw on the witness stand and I'd have to do what I did in that courtroom. I hated doing it, because it was an insult to you to defend you--and it was an insult to myself that you had to be defended....Roark, I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the halfway, the almost, the just-about, the in-between. They may have their justifications. I don't know. I don't care to inquire. I know that it is the one thing not given me to understand. When I think of what you are, I can't accept any reality except a world of your kind. Or at least a world in which you have a fighting chance and a fight on your own terms. That does not exist. And I can't live a life torn between that which exists--and you. It would mean to struggle against things and men who don't deserve to be your opponents. Your fight, using their methods--and that's too horrible a desecration. It would mean doing for you what I did for Peter Keating: lie, flatter, evade, compromise, pander to every ineptitude--in order to beg of them a chance for you, beg them to let you live, to let you function, to beg them, Roark, not to laugh at them, but to tremble because they hold the power to hurt you. Am I too weak because I can't do this? I don't know which is the greater strength: to accept all this for you--or to love you so much that the rest is beyond acceptance. I don't know. I love you too much."

This is--for the time when we won't be together. I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breathe air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. I've given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need. This is the only way you can wish to be loved. This is the only way I can want you to love me. If you married me now, I would become your whole existence. But I would not want you then. You would not want yourself--and so you would not love me long. To say 'I love you' one must know first how to say the 'I.' The kind of surrender I could have from you now would give me nothing but an empty hulk. If I demanded it, I'd destroy you. That's why I won't stop you. I'll let you go to your husband. I don't know how I'll live through tonight, but I will. I want you whole, as I am, as you'll remain in the battle you've chosen. A battle is never selfless."

"You must learn not to be afraid of the world. Not to be held by it as you are now. Never to be hurt by it as you were in that courtroom. I must let you learn it. I can't help you. You must find your own way. When you have, you'll come back to me. They won't destroy me, Dominique. And they won't destroy you. You'll win, because you've chosen the hardest way of fighting for your freedom from the world. I'll wait for you. I love you. I'm saying this now for all the years we'll have to wait. I love you, Dominique." Then he kissed her and let her go.

"They say three's a crowd," laughed Keating. "But that's bosh. Two are better than one, and sometimes three are better than two, it all depends." "The only thing wrong with that old cliché," said Toohey, "is the erroneous implication that 'a crowd' is a term of opprobrium. It is quite the opposite. As you are so merrily discovering. Three, I might add, is a mystic key number. As for instance, the Holy Trinity. Or the triangle, without which we would have no movie industry. There are so many variations upon the triangle, not necessarily unhappy. Like the three of us--with me serving as understudy for the hypotenuse, quite an appropriate substitution, since I'm replacing my antipode, don't you think so, Dominique?"

Mallory had tried to object. "Shut up, Steve," Roark had said. "I'm not doing it for you. At a time like this I owe myself a few luxuries. So I'm simply buying the most valuable thing that can be bought--your time. I'm competing with a whole country--and that's quite a luxury, isn't it? They want you to do baby plaques and I don't, and I like having my way against theirs." "What do you want me to work on, Howard?" "I want you to work without asking anyone what he wants you to work on."

Roark had never seen the reconstructed Stoddard Temple. On an evening in November he went to see it. He did not know whether it was surrender to pain or victory over the fear of seeing it.

People always speak of a black death or a red death, he thought; yours, Gail Wynand, will be a gray death. Why hasn't anyone ever said that this is the ultimate horror? Not screams, pleas or convulsions. Not the indifference of a clean emptiness, disinfected by the fire of some great disaster. But this--a mean, smutty little horror, impotent even to frighten. You can't do it like that, he told himself, smiling coldly; it would be in such bad taste.

He was alone now. The curtains were open. He stood looking at the city. It was late and the great riot of lights below him was beginning to die down. He thought that he did not mind having to look at the city for many more years and he did not mind never seeing it again.

If Toohey's eyes had not been fixed insolently on Wynand's, he would have been ordered out of the office at once. But the glance told Wynand that Toohey knew to what extent he had been plagued by people recommending architects and how hard he had tried to avoid them; and that Toohey had outwitted him by obtaining this interview for a purpose Wynand had not expected. The impertinence of it amused Wynand, as Toohey had known it would.

That, Mr. Wynand, is my sincere opinion." "I quite believe you." "You do?" "Of course. But, Mr. Toohey, why should I consider your opinion?"

"Really, Mr. Toohey, I owe you an apology, if, by allowing my tastes to become so well known, I caused you to be so crude. But I had no idea that among your many other humanitarian activities you were also a pimp."

Nothing had happened to him--a happening is a positive reality, and no reality could ever make him helpless; this was some enormous negative--as if everything had been wiped out, leaving a senseless emptiness, faintly indecent because it seemed so ordinary, so unexciting, like murder wearing a homey smile. Nothing was gone--except desire; no, more than that--the root, the desire to desire. He thought that a man who loses his eyes still retains the concept of sight; but he had heard of a ghastlier blindness--if the brain centre’s controlling vision are destroyed, one loses even the memory of visual perception.

It was the lack of shock, when he thought he would kill himself, that convinced him he should. The thought seemed so simple, like an argument not worth contesting. Like a bromide. Now he stood at the glass wall, stopped by that very simplicity. One could make a bromide of one's life, he thought; but not of one's death.

It was like using a steamroller to press handkerchiefs. But he set his teeth and stuck to it.

The girl with whom he fell in love had an exquisite beauty, a beauty to be worshipped, not desired. She was fragile and silent. Her face told of the lovely mysteries within her, left unexpressed.

His decision contradicted every rule he had laid down for his career. But he did not think. It was one of the rare explosions that hit him at times, throwing him beyond caution, making of him a creature possessed by the single impulse to have his way, because the rightness of his way was so blindingly total.

The public asked for crime, scandal and sentiment. Gail Wynand provided it. He gave people what they wanted, plus a justification for indulging the tastes of which they had been ashamed.

"If you make people perform a noble duty, it bores them," said Wynand. "If you make them indulge themselves, it shames them. But combine the two--and you've got them."

"It is not my function," said Wynand, "to help people preserve a self-respect they haven't got. You give them what they profess to like in public. I give them what they really like. Honesty is the best policy, gentlemen, though not quite in the sense you were taught to believe."

Every man on earth has a soul of his own that nobody can stare at.

He moved his hand, weighing the gun. He smiled, a faint smile of derision. No, he thought, that's not for you. Not yet. You still have the sense of not wanting to die senselessly. You were stopped by that. Even that is a remnant--of something.

"Are you making fun of me, Dominique?" "Have you given me reason to?"

You wanted a mirror. 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.

“before--you took something I had..." "No. I took something you never had. I grant you that's worse." "What?" "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."

"Most people go to very to very great lengths in order to convince themselves of their self-respect." "Yes." "And, of course, a quest for self-respect is proof of its lack." "Yes." "Do you see the meaning of a quest for self-contempt?" "That I lack it?" "And that you'll never achieve it." "I didn't expect you to understand that either." "I won't say anything else--or I'll stop being the person before last in the world and I'll become unsuitable to your purpose." He rose. "Shall I tell you formally that I accept your offer?" She inclined her head in agreement.

"Shall I tell you the difference between you and your statue?" "No." "But I want to. It's startling to see the same elements used in two compositions with opposite themes. Everything about you in that statue is the theme of exaltation. But your own theme is suffering." "Suffering? I'm not conscious of having shown that." "You haven't. That's what I meant. No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain."

Dominique looked at the gold letters--I Do--on the delicate white bow. "What does that name mean?" she asked. "It's an answer," said Wynand, "to people long since dead. Though perhaps they are the only immortal ones. You see, the sentence I heard most often in my childhood was 'You don't run things around here.'"

"Yes, of course. Forgive me for implying any weakness in you. I know better. By the way, you haven't asked me where we're going." "That, too, would be weakness." "True. I'm glad you don't care. Because I never have any definite destination. This ship is not for going to places, but for getting away from them. When I stop at a port, it's only for the sheer pleasure of leaving it. I always think: Here's one more spot that can't hold me." "I used to travel a great deal. I always felt just like that. I've been told it's because I'm a hater of mankind." "You're not foolish enough to believe that, are you?" "I don't know."

As a matter of fact, 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."

"I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline. Particularly when one can't see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window--no, I don't feel how small I am--but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body."

"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?" "When I find the answer to that," she said, "I'll make my peace with the world."

"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? But Howard--one can imagine him existing forever."

"You understand. Nobody else does. And you like me." "Devotedly. Whenever I have the time." "Ah?"

She thought that they had not greeted each other and that it was right. This was not a reunion, but just one moment out of something that had never been interrupted. She thought how strange it would be if she ever said "Hello" to him; one did not greet oneself each morning.

"Roark, try to understand, please try to understand. I can't bear to see what they're doing to you, what they're going to do. It's too great--you and building and what you feel about it. You can't go on like that for long. It won't last. They won't let you. You're moving to some terrible kind of disaster. It can't end any other way. Give it up. Take some meaningless job--like the quarry. We'll live here. We'll have little and we'll give nothing. We'll live only for what we are and for what we know." He laughed. She heard, in the sound of it, a surprising touch of consideration for her--the attempt not to laugh; but he couldn't stop it. "Dominique." The way he pronounced the name remained with her and made it easier to hear the words that followed: "I wish I could tell you that it was a temptation, at least for a moment. But it wasn't." He added: "If I were very cruel, I'd accept it. Just to see how soon you'd beg me to go back to building." "Yes...Probably..."

"Until--when, Roark?" His hand moved over the streets. "Until you stop hating all this, stop being afraid of it, learn not to notice it."

He bowed, his manner unchanged, his calm still holding the same peculiar quality made of two things: the mature control of a man so certain of his capacity for control that it could seem casual, and a childlike simplicity of accepting events as if they were subject to no possible change.

"What's got into him?" "It's nothing that got into him, Alvah. It's something that got out at last."

She saw no apology, no regret, no resentment as he looked at her. It was a strange glance; she had noticed it before; a glance of simple worship. And it made her realize that there is a stage of worship which makes the worshiper himself an object of reverence.

"Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I'm not the Gail Wynand you'd heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you'd want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that's the impossible, the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you'd want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn't be easy for you." "If that's true, then you..." "Then I become gentle and humble--to your great astonishment--because I'm the worst scoundrel living."

"I don't want to. But I like to be honest. That has been my only private luxury. Don't change your mind about me. Go on seeing me as you saw me before we met." "Gail, that's not what you want." "It doesn't matter what I want. I don't want anything--except to own you. Without any answer from you. It has to be without answer. If you begin to look at me too closely, you'll see things you won't like at all." "What things?" "You're so beautiful, Dominique. It's such a lovely accident on God's part that there's one person who matches inside and out." "What things, Gail?" "Do you know what you're actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art. That's the only field where it can be found--art. But you want it in the flesh. You're in love with it. Well, you see, I've never had any integrity."

"All right, Gail. Let's go in. It's too cold for you here without an overcoat." He chuckled softly--it was the kind of concern she had never shown for him before. He took her hand and kissed her palm, holding it against his face. # For many weeks, when left alone together, they spoke little and never about each other. But it was not a silence of resentment; it was the silence of an understanding too delicate to limit by words. They would be in a room together in the evening, saying nothing, content to feel each other's presence. They would look at each other suddenly--and both would smile, the smile like hands clasped.

"Gail," she said gently, "some day I'll have to ask your forgiveness for having married you." He shook his head slowly, smiling. She said: "I wanted you to be my chain to the world. You've become my defense, instead. And that makes my marriage dishonest." "No. I told you I would accept any reason you chose." "But you've changed everything for me. Or was it I that changed it? I don't know. We've done something strange to each other. I've given you what I wanted to lose. That special sense of living I thought this marriage would destroy for me. The sense of life as exaltation. And you--you've done all the things I would have done. Do you know how much alike we are?" "I knew that from the first." "But it should have been impossible. Gail, I want to remain with you now--for another reason. To wait for an answer. I think when I learn to understand what you are, I'll understand myself. There is an answer. There is a name for the thing we have in common. I don't know it. I know it's very important." "Probably. I suppose I should want to understand it. But I don't. I can't care about anything now. I can't even be afraid." She looked up at him and said very calmly: "I am afraid, Gail." "Of what, dearest?" "Of what I'm doing to you." "Why?" "I don't love you, Gail." "I can't care even about that." She dropped her head and he looked down at the hair that was like a pale helmet of polished metal. "Dominique." She raised her face to him obediently. "I love you, Dominique. I love you so much that nothing can matter to me--not even you. Can you understand that? Only my love--not your answer. Not even your indifference. I've never taken much from the world. I haven't wanted much. I've never really wanted anything. Not in the total, undivided way, not with the kind of desire that becomes an ultimatum, 'yes' or 'no,' and one can't accept the 'no' without ceasing to exist. That's what you are to me. But when one reaches that stage, it's not the object that matters, it's the desire. Not you, but I. The ability to desire like that. Nothing less is worth feeling or honoring. And I've never felt that before. Dominique, I've never known how to say 'mine' about anything. Not in the sense I say it about you. Mine. Did you call it a sense of life as exaltation? You said that. You understand. I can't be afraid. I love you, Dominique--I love you--you're letting me say it now--I love you."

Men have not found the words for it nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music. Let me see that in one single act of man on earth. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. 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 courage for mine.

Music, he thought, the promise of the music he had invoked, the sense of it made real--there it was before his eyes--he did not see it--he heard it in chords--he thought that there was a common language of thought, sight and sound--was it mathematics?--the discipline of reason--music was mathematics--and architecture was music in stone--he knew he was dizzy because this place below him could not be real.

And then he saw Mr. Bradley come to visit the site, to smile blandly and depart again. Then Mallory felt anger without reason--and fear. "Howard," Mallory said one night, when they sat together at a fire of dry branches on the hillside over the camp, "it's the Stoddard Temple again." "Yes," said Roark. "I think so. But I can't figure out in just what way or what they're after." He rolled over on his stomach and looked down at the panes of glass scattered through the darkness below; they caught reflections from somewhere and looked like phosphorescent, self-generated springs of light rising out of the ground. He said: "It doesn't matter, Steve, does it? Not what they do about it nor who comes to live here. Only that we've made it. Would you have missed this, no matter what price they make you pay for it afterward?" "No," said Mallory.

But the root of evil--my drooling beast--it's there. Howard, in that story. In that--and in the souls of the smug bastards who'll read it and say: 'Oh well, genius must always struggle, it's good for 'em'--and then go and look for some village idiot to help, to teach him how to weave baskets. That's the drooling beast in action.

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."

"Most people build as they live--as a matter of routine and senseless accident. But a few understand that building is a great symbol. We live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life. If he doesn't build, when he has the means, it's because his life has not been what he wanted."

"I never meet the men whose work I love. The work means too much to me. I don't want the men to spoil it. They usually do. They're an anticlimax to their own talent. You're not. I don't mind talking to you. I told you this only because I want you to know that I respect very little in life, but I respect the things in my gallery, and your buildings, and man's capacity to produce work like that. Maybe it's the only religion I've ever had." He shrugged.

"I want it to be a palace--only I don't think palaces are very luxurious. They're so big, so promiscuously public. A small house is the true luxury. A residence for two people only--for my wife and me. It won't be necessary to allow for a family, we don't intend to have children. Nor for visitors, we don't intend to entertain. One guest room--in case we should need it--but not more than that. Living room, dining room, library, two studies, one bedroom. Servants' quarters, garage. That's the general idea.

"I can't pretend an anger I don't feel," said Roark. "It's not pity. It's much more cruel than anything I could do. Only I'm not doing it in order to be cruel. If I slapped your face, you'd forgive me for the Stoddard Temple." "Is it you who should seek forgiveness?" "No. You wish I did. You know that there's an act of forgiveness involved. You're not clear about the actors. You wish I would forgive you--or demand payment, which is the same thing--and you believe that that would close the record. But, you see, I have nothing to do with it. I'm not one of the actors. It doesn't matter what I do or feel about it now. You're not thinking of me. I can't help you. I'm not the person you're afraid of just now." "Who is?" "Yourself." "Who gave you the right to say all this?" "You did." "Well, go on." "Do you wish the rest?" "Go on." "I think it hurts you to know that you've made me suffer. You wish you hadn't. And yet there's something that frightens you more. The knowledge that I haven't suffered at all." "Go on." "The knowledge that I'm neither kind nor generous now, but simply indifferent. It frightens you, because you know that things like the Stoddard Temple always require payment--and you see that I'm not paying for it. You were astonished that I accepted this commission. Do you think my acceptance required courage? You needed far greater courage to hire me. You see, this is what I think of the Stoddard Temple. I'm through with it. You're not." Wynand let his fingers fall open, palms out. His shoulders sagged a little, relaxing. He said very simply: "All right. It's true. All of it."

Did you want to scream, when you were a child, seeing nothing but fat ineptitude around you, knowing how many things could be done and done so well, but having no power to do them? Having no power to blast the empty skulls around you? Having to take orders--and that's bad enough--but to take orders from your inferiors! Have you felt that?" "Yes." "Did you drive the anger back inside of you, and store it, and decide to let yourself be torn to pieces if necessary, but reach the day when you'd rule those people and all people and everything around you?" "No." "You didn't? You let yourself forget?" "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."

"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." "In this sense, you share things with others?" "No. It's not sharing. 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 the way in which I own it. But if you said you own 'Amen' to it--it's also yours. And I'm glad it's yours."

"You told them you don't co-operate or collaborate." "But it wasn't a gesture, Gail. It was plain common sense. One can't collaborate on one's own job. I can co-operate, if that's what they call it, with the workers who erect my buildings. But I can't help them to lay bricks and they can't help me to design the house."

He leaned against the filing cabinet, letting his feet slide forward, his arms crossed, and he spoke softly: "Howard I had a kitten once. The damn thing attached itself to me--a flea-bitten little beast from the gutter, just fur, mud and bones--followed me home, I fed it and kicked it out, but the next day there it was again, and finally I kept it. I was seventeen then, working for the Gazette, just learning to work in the special way I had to learn for life. I could take it all right, but not all of it. There were times when it was pretty bad. Evenings, usually. Once I wanted to kill myself. Not anger--anger made me work harder. Not fear. But disgust, Howard. The kind of disgust that made it seem as if the whole world were under water and the water stood still, water that had backed up out of the sewers and ate into everything, even the sky, even my brain. And then I looked at that kitten. And I thought that it didn't know the things I loathed, it could never know. It was clean--clean in the absolute sense, because it had no capacity to conceive of the world's ugliness. I can't tell you what relief there was in trying to imagine the state of consciousness inside that little brain, trying to share it, a living consciousness, but clean and free. I would lie down on the floor and put my face on that cat's belly, and hear the beast purring. And then I would feel better....There, Howard. I've called your office a rotting wharf and yourself an alley cat. That's my way of paying homage." Roark smiled. Wynand saw that the smile was grateful.

But it hurts me, he thought. It hurts me every time I think of him. It makes everything easier--the people, the editorials, the contracts--but easier because it hurts so much. Pain is a stimulant also. I think I hate that name. I will go on repeating it. It is a pain I wish to bear.

Structure, thought Wynand, is a solved problem of tension, of balance, of security in counterthrusts.

"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...What are you thinking of, Gail?" "The photograph on the wall of my office."

If you want something to grow, you don't nurture each seed separately. You just spread a certain fertilizer. Nature will do the rest.

"What do you mean?" "Nothing that you could possibly grasp. And I must not overtax your strength. You don't look as if you had much to spare."

You can devote your life to pulling out each single weed as it comes up--and then ten lifetimes won't be enough for the job. Or you can prepare your soil in such a manner--by spreading a certain chemical, let us say--that it will be impossible for weeds to grow. This last is faster.

"Ellsworth, I don't know what you're talking about." "But of course you don't. That's my advantage I say these things publicly every single day--and nobody knows what I'm talking about."

"You want to do it?" "I might. If you offer me enough." "Howard--anything you ask. Anything. I'd sell my soul..." "That's the sort of thing I want you to understand. To sell your soul is the 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?" "Yes...Yes, I think so."

I worked because I can't look at any material without thinking: What could be done with it? And the moment I think that, I've got to do it. To find the answer, to break the thing. I've worked on it for years. I loved it. I worked because it was a problem I wanted to solve.

You see, I'm never concerned with my clients, only with their architectural requirements. I consider these as part of my building's theme and problem, as my building's material--just as I consider bricks and steel. Bricks and steel are not my motive. Neither are the clients. Both are only the means of my work. Peter, before you can do things for people, you must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. The work, not the people. Your own action, not any possible object of your charity. I'll be glad if people who need it find a better manner of living in a house I designed. But that's not the motive of my work. Nor my reason. Nor my reward."

Well, I've told you all the things in which I don't believe, so that you'll understand what I want and what right I have to want it. I don't believe in government housing. I don't want to hear anything about its noble purposes. I don't think they're noble. But that, too, doesn't matter. That's not my first concern. Not who lives in the house nor who orders it built. Only the house itself. If it has to be built, it might as well be built right."

The only thing that matters, my goal, my reward, my beginning, my end is the work itself. My work done my way. Peter, there's nothing in the world that you can offer me, except this. Offer me this and you can have anything I've got to give. My work done my way. A private, personal, selfish, egotistical motivation. That's the only way I function. That's all I am."

"What are you talking about?" "Nothing. Don't pay any attention. I'm half asleep." She thought: This is the tribute to Gail, the confidence of surrender--he relaxes like a cat--and cats don't relax except with people they like.

You and he as inseparable friends upsets every rational concept I've ever held. After all, there are distinct classes of humanity--no, I'm not talking Toohey's language--but there are certain boundary lines among men which cannot be crossed." "Yes, there are. But nobody has ever given the proper statement of where they must be drawn."

"You see how stupid those things sound. It's natural for you to be a little contrite--a normal reflex--but we must look at it objectively, we're grownup, rational people, nothing is too serious, we can't really help what we do, we're conditioned that way, we just charge it off to experience and go on from there."

"Katie...for six years...I thought of how I'd ask your forgiveness some day. And now I have the chance, but I won't ask it. It seems...it seems beside the point. I know it's horrible to say that, but that's how it seems to me. It was the worst thing I ever did in my life--but not because I hurt you. I did hurt you, Katie, and maybe more than you know yourself. But that's not my worst guilt....Katie, I wanted to marry you. It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that's the sin that can't be forgiven--that I hadn't done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there's no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain--and wasted pain....Katie, why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want. As I wanted to marry you. Not as I want to sleep with some woman or get drunk or get my name in the papers. Those things--they're not even desires--they're things people do to escape from desires--because it's such a big responsibility, really to want something."

Katie?...People always regret that the past is so final, that nothing can change it--but I'm glad it's so. We can't spoil it. We can think of the past, can't we? Why shouldn't we? I mean, as you said, like grownup people, not fooling ourselves, not trying to hope, but only to look back at it....

"I'm not running away from my work, if that's what surprises you. I know when to stop--and I can't stop, unless it's completely. I know I've overdone it. I've been wasting too much paper lately and doing awful stuff." "Do you ever do awful stuff?" "Probably more of it than any other architect and with less excuse. The only distinction I can claim is that my botches end up in my own wastebasket."

"You made a mistake on the Stoddard Temple, Howard. That statue should have been, not of Dominique, but of you." "No. I'm too egotistical for that." "Egotistical? An egotist would have loved it. You use words in the strangest way." "In the exact way. I don't wish to be the symbol of anything. I'm only myself."

"I erased my ego out of existence in a way never achieved by any saint in a cloister. Yet people call me corrupt. Why? The saint in a cloister sacrifices only material things. It's a small price to pay for the glory of his soul. He hoards his soul and gives up the world. But I--I took automobiles, silk pyjamas, a penthouse, and gave the world my soul in exchange. Who's sacrificed more--if sacrifice is the test of virtue? Who's the actual saint?"

“What else can one do if one must serve the people? If one must live for others? Either pander to everybody's wishes and be called corrupt; or impose on everybody by force your own idea of everybody's good. Can you think of any other way?" "No."

"The thing that is destroying the world. The thing you were talking about. Actual selflessness." "The ideal which they say does not exist?" "They're wrong. It does exist--though not in the way they imagine. It's what I couldn't understand about people for a long time. They have no self. They live within others. They live second-hand. Look at Peter Keating." "You look at him. I hate his guts." "I've looked at him--at what's left of him--and it's helped me to understand. He's paying the price and wondering for what sin and telling himself that he's been too selfish. In what act or thought of his has there ever been a self? What was his aim in life? Greatness--in other people's eyes. Fame, admiration, envy--all that which comes from others. Others dictated his convictions, which he did not hold, but he was satisfied that others believed he held them. Others were his motive power and his prime concern. He didn't want to be great, but to be thought great. He didn't want to build, but to be admired as a builder. He borrowed from others in order to make an impression on others. There's your actual selflessness. It's his ego he's betrayed and given up. But everybody calls him selfish." "That's the pattern most people follow." "Yes! And isn't that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he's honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he's great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison. The man whose sole aim is to make money. Now I don't see anything evil in a desire to make money. But money is only a means to some end. If a man wants it for a personal purpose--to invest in his industry, to create, to study, to travel, to enjoy luxury--he's completely moral. But the men who place money first go much beyond that. Personal luxury is a limited endeavor. What they want is ostentation: to show, to stun, to entertain, to impress others. They're second-handers. Look at our so-called cultural endeavors. A lecturer who spouts some borrowed rehash of nothing at all that means nothing at all to him--and the people who listen and don't give a damn, but sit there in order to tell their friends that they have attended a lecture by a famous name. All second-handers." "If I were Ellsworth Toohey, I'd say: aren't you making out a case against selfishness? Aren't they all acting on a selfish motive--to be noticed, liked, admired?" "--by others. At the price of their own self-respect. In the realm of greatest importance--the realm of values, of judgment, of spirit, of thought--they place others above self, in the exact manner which altruism demands. A truly selfish man cannot be affected by the approval of others. He doesn't need it."

When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation--anchored to nothing. That's the emptiness I couldn't understand in people. That's what stopped me whenever I faced a committee. Men without an ego. Opinion without a rational process. Motion without brakes or motor. Power without responsibility. The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person. It's everywhere and nowhere and you can't reason with him. He's not open to reason. You can't speak to him--he can't hear. You're tried by an empty bench. A blind mass running amuck, to crush you without sense or purpose. Steve Mallory couldn't define the monster, but he knew. That's the drooling beast he fears. The second-hander."

“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. Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You've wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire, he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion--prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can't say about a single thing: 'This is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me.' Then he wonders why he's unhappy. Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched. The things which are sacred or precious to us are the things we withdraw from promiscuous sharing. But now we are taught to throw everything within us into public light and common pawing. To seek joy in meeting halls. We haven't even got a word for the quality I mean--for the self-sufficiency of man's spirit. It's difficult to call it selfishness or egotism, the words have been perverted, they've come to mean Peter Keating. 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." "I'm glad you admit that you have friends." "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 smiled. "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."

"It's I who've destroyed you, Peter. From the beginning. By helping you. There are matters in which one must not ask for help nor give it. I shouldn't have done your projects at Stanton. I shouldn't have done the Cosmo-Slotnick Building. Nor Cortlandt. I loaded you with more than you could carry. It's like an electric current too strong for the circuit. It blows the fuse. Now we'll both pay for it. It will be hard on you, but it will be harder on me."

"Howard! They didn't do it on purpose." "That's what makes it worse."

She felt no moment of shock, only the memory of one, a shock in the past tense, the thought: I must have been shocked when I saw him, but not now. Now, by the time she was standing before him, it seemed very simple. She thought: The most important never has to be said between us. It has always been said like this. He did not want to see me alone. Now he's here. I waited and I'm ready. "Good evening, Dominique." She heard the name pronounced to fill the space of five years. She said quietly: "Good evening, Roark."

He had not wanted to name it; he had wanted her to understand and show no fear. She had not been able to accept the Stoddard trial, she had run from the dread of seeing him hurt by the world, but she had agreed to help him in this. Had agreed in complete serenity. She was free and he knew it.

(…) and some woman had said: "Dominique, I didn't know you could be so wonderful!" and she had answered: "I haven't a care in the world."

She knew the doctor had told him she would not survive, that first night. She had wanted to tell them all that she would, that she had no choice now but to live; only it did not seem important to tell people anything, ever.

"You'll be acquitted." "That's not what I want to hear you say." "If they convict you--if they lock you in jail or put you in a chain gang--if they smear your name in every filthy headline--if they never let you design another building--if they never let me see you again--it will not matter. Not too much. Only down to a certain point." "That's what I've waited to hear for seven years, Dominique." He took her hand, he raised it and held it to his lips (…)

This was solidarity. The debutante having her toenails pedicured--the housewife buying carrots from a pushcart--the bookkeeper who had wanted to be a pianist, but had the excuse of a sister to support--the businessman who hated his business--the worker who hated his work--the intellectual who hated everybody--all were united as brothers in the luxury of common anger that cured boredom and took them out of themselves, and they knew well enough what a blessing it was to be taken out of themselves.

"We have never made an effort to understand what is greatness in man and how to recognize it," said another Wynand editorial. "We have come to hold, in a kind of mawkish stupor, that greatness is to be gauged by self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, we drool, is the ultimate virtue. Let's stop and think for a moment. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feelings? The independence of his thought? But these are a man's supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain. They, however, are above sacrificing to any cause or consideration whatsoever. Should we not, then, stop preaching dangerous and vicious nonsense? Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that we must respect in man above all."

"There are occasions, Alvah, when the issues at stake are not the ostensible facts at all. And the public reaction seems out of all proportion, but isn't.”

“It's only a matter of discovering the lever. If you learn how to rule one single man's soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It's the soul, Peter, the soul. Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That's why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which can't be ruled. It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it--and the man is yours. You won't need a whip--he'll bring it to you and ask to be whipped. Set him in reverse--and his own mechanism will do your work for you. Use him against himself. Want to know how it's done? See if I ever lied to you. See if you haven't heard all this for years, but didn't want to hear, and the fault is yours, not mine. There are many ways. Here's one. Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity. That's difficult. The worst among you gropes for an ideal in his own twisted way. Kill integrity by internal corruption. Use it against itself. Direct it toward a goal destructive of all integrity. Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell men that altruism is the ideal. Not a single one of them has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will. His every living instinct screams against it. But don't you see what you accomplish? Man realizes that he's incapable of what he's accepted as the noblest virtue--and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness. Since the supreme ideal is beyond his grasp, he gives up eventually all ideals, all aspiration, all sense of his personal value. He feels himself obliged to preach what he can't practice. But one can't be good halfway or honest approximately. To preserve one's integrity is a hard battle. Why preserve that which one knows to be corrupt already? His soul gives up its self-respect. You've got him. He'll obey. He'll be glad to obey--because he can't trust himself, he feels uncertain, he feels unclean. That's one way. Here's another. Kill man's sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it. Great men can't be ruled. We don't want any great men. Don't deny the conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept--and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. Laugh at Roark and hold Peter Keating as a great architect. You've destroyed architecture. Build up Lois Cook and you've destroyed literature. Hail Ike and you've destroyed the theater. Glorify Lancelot Clokey and you've destroyed the press. Don't set out to raze all shrines--you'll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity--and the shrines are razed. Then there's another way. Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It's simple. Tell them to laugh at everything. Tell them that a sense of humor is an unlimited virtue. Don't let anything remain sacred in a man's soul--and his soul won't be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man. One doesn't reverence with a giggle. He'll obey and he'll set no limits to his obedience--anything goes--nothing is too serious. Here's another way. This is most important. Don't allow men to be happy. Happiness is self-contained and self-sufficient. Happy men have no time and no use for you. Happy men are free men. So kill their joy in living. Take away from them whatever is dear or important to them. Never let them have what they want. Make them feel that the mere fact of a personal desire is evil. Bring them to a state where saying I want' is no longer a natural right, but a shameful admission. Altruism is of great help in this. Unhappy men will come to you. They'll need you. They'll come for consolation, for support, for escape. Nature allows no vacuum. Empty man's soul--and the space is yours to fill. I don't see why you should look so shocked, Peter. This is the oldest one

of all. Look back at history. Look at any great system of ethics, from the Orient up. Didn't they all preach the sacrifice of personal joy? Under all the complications of verbiage, haven't they all had a single leitmotif: sacrifice, renunciation, self-denial? Haven't you been able to catch their theme song--'Give up, give up, give up, give up'? Look at the moral atmosphere of today. Everything enjoyable, from cigarettes to sex to ambition to the profit motive, is considered depraved or sinful. Just prove that a thing makes men happy--and you've damned it. That's how far we've come. We've tied happiness to guilt. And we've got mankind by the throat. Throw your first-born into a sacrificial furnace--lie on a bed of nails--go into the desert to mortify the flesh--don't dance--don't go to the movies on Sunday--don't try to get rich--don't smoke--don't drink. It's all the same line. The great line. Fools think that taboos of this nature are just nonsense. Something left over, old-fashioned. But there's always a purpose in nonsense. Don't bother to examine a folly--ask yourself only what it accomplishes. Every system of ethics that preached sacrifice grew into a world power and ruled millions of men. Of course, you must dress it up. You must tell people that they'll achieve a superior kind of happiness by giving up everything that makes them happy. You don't have to be too clear about it. Use big vague words. 'Universal Harmony'--'Eternal Spirit'--'Divine Purpose'--'Nirvana'--'Paradise'--'Racial Supremacy'--'The Dictatorship of the Proletariat.' Internal corruption, Peter. That's the oldest one of all. The farce has been going on for centuries and men still fall for it. Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice--run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if ever you hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it's your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself--that will be the man who's not after your soul. That will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and you'll scream your empty heads off, howling that he's a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries. But here you might have noticed something. I said, 'It stands to reason.' Do you see? Men have a weapon against you. Reason. So you must be very sure to take it away from them. Cut the props from under it. But be careful. Don't deny outright. Never deny anything outright, you give your hand away. Don't say reason is evil--though some have gone that far and with astonishing success. Just say that reason is limited. That there's something above it. What? You don't have to be too clear about it either. The field's inexhaustible. 'Instinct'--'Feeling'--'Revelation'--'Divine Intuition'--'Dialectic Materialism.' If you get caught at some crucial point and somebody tells you that your doctrine doesn't make sense--you're ready for him. You tell him that there's something above sense. That here he must not try to think, he must feel. He must believe. Suspend reason and you play it deuces wild. Anything goes in any manner you wish whenever you need it. You've got him. Can you rule a thinking man? We don't want any thinking men."

Vox populi. The average, the common, the general. Do you know the proper antonym for Ego? Bromide, Peter. The rule of the bromide. But even the trite has to be originated by someone at some time.

Everything that can't be ruled, must go. And if freaks persist in being born occasionally, they will not survive beyond their twelfth year. When their brain begins to function, it will feel the pressure and it will explode. The pressure gauged to a vacuum. Do you know the fate of deep-sea creatures brought out to sunlight? So much for future Roarks. The rest of you will smile and obey. Have you noticed that the imbecile always smiles? Man's first frown is the first touch of God on his forehead. The touch of thought. But we'll have neither God nor thought.

“Practical men deal in bank accounts, real estate, advertising contracts and gilt-edged securities. They leave to the impractical intellectuals, like me, the amusements of putting the gilt edges through a chemical analysis to learn a few things about the nature and the source of gold. They hang on to Kream-O Pudding, and leave us such trivia as the theater, the movies, the radio, the schools, the book reviews and the criticism of architecture. Just a sop to keep us quiet if we care to waste our time playing with the inconsequentials of life, while you're making money. Money is power. Is it, Mr. Wynand? So you were after power, Mr. Wynand? Power over men? You poor amateur! You never discovered the nature of your own ambition or you'd have known that you weren't fit for it. You couldn't use the methods required and you wouldn't want the results. You've never been enough of a scoundrel. I don't mind handing you that, because I don't know which is worse: to be a great scoundrel or a gigantic fool. That's why I'll be back. And when I am, I'll run this paper."

Once he found her, broom in hand, sweeping an office; the maintenance department had fallen apart, charwomen appeared and disappeared, no one had time to notice. "Is that what I'm paying you for?" he asked. "Well, we can't work in a pigsty. I haven't asked you what you're paying me, but I want a raise." "Drop this thing, for God's sake! It's ridiculous." "What's ridiculous? It's clean now. It didn't take me long. Is it a good job?" "It's a good job." She leaned on the broom handle and laughed. "I believe you thought, like everybody else, that I'm just a kind of luxury object, a high-class type of kept woman, didn't you, Gail?" "Is this the way you can keep going when you want to?" "This is the way I've wanted to keep going all my life--if I could find a reason for it."

"Good evening, Gail," Roark said calmly when he came in. "I don't know what's a more conspicuous form of bad discipline," said Wynand, throwing his hat down on a table by the door, "to blurt things right out or to ignore them blatantly. I look like hell. Say it."

"I don't expect you to save me. I think I have a chance to win. The strike won't make it better or worse. Don't worry about me. And don't give in. If you stick to the end--you won't need me any longer."

There is a net--longer than the cables that coil through the walls of this city, larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water, gas and refuse--there is another hidden net around you; it is strapped to you, and the wires lead to every hand in the city. They jerked the wires and you moved. You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends.

"You have been the one encounter in my life that can never be repeated..."

I never got out of here. I never got out. I surrendered to the grocery man--to the deck hands on the ferryboat--to the owner of the poolroom. You don't run things around here. You don't run things around here. You've never run things anywhere, Gail Wynand. You've only added yourself to the things they ran.

Anything may be betrayed, anyone may be forgiven. But not those who lack the courage of their own greatness.

"You can wait for 'One Small Voice' another month or so, can't you? I've filed suit with the labor board today, to be reinstated in my job on the Banner. There are more ways than one to skin a cat, Lance. The skinning isn't important once you've broken its spine."

Roark wrote him a long letter: "...Gail, I know. I hoped you could escape it, but since it had to happen, start again from where you are. I know what you're doing to yourself. You're not doing it for my sake, it's not up to me, but if this will help you I want to say that I'm repeating, now, everything I've ever said to you. Nothing has changed for me. You're still what you were. I'm not saying that I forgive you, because there can be no such question between us. But if you can't forgive yourself, will you let me do it? Let me say that it doesn't matter, it's not the final verdict on you. Give me the right to let you forget it. Go on just on my faith until you've recovered. I know it's something no man can do for another, but if I am what I've been to you, you'll accept it. Call it a blood transfusion. You need it. Take it. It's harder than fighting that strike. Do it for my sake, if that will help you. But do it. Come back. There will be another chance. What you think you've lost can neither be lost nor found. Don't let it go."

Dominique lay stretched out on the shore of the lake. She looked at the house on the hill, at the tree branches above her. Flat on her back, hands crossed under her head, she studied the motion of leaves against the sky. It was an earnest occupation, giving her full contentment. She thought, it's a lovely kind of green, there's a difference between the color of plants and the color of objects, this has light in it, this is not just green, but also the living force of the tree made visible, I don't have to look down, I can see the branches, the trunk, the roots just by looking at that color. That fire around the edges is the sun, I don't have to see it, I can tell what the whole countryside looks like today. The spots of light weaving in circles--that's the lake, the special kind of light that comes refracted from water, the lake is beautiful today, and it's better not to see it, just to guess by these spots. I have never been able to enjoy it before, the sight of the earth, it's such great background, but it has no meaning except as a background, and I thought of those who owned it and then it hurt me too much. I can love it now. They don't own it. They own nothing. They've never won. I have seen the life of Gail Wynand, and now I know. One cannot hate the earth in their name. The earth is beautiful. And it is a background, but not theirs.

She knew what she had to do. But she would give herself a few days. She thought, I've learned to bear anything except happiness. I must learn how to carry it. How not to break under it. It's the only discipline I'll need from now on.

He knew that this was to be the solemnity of the moment--that it needed no solemnity; it was not to be stressed and set apart, it was not this particular evening, but the completed meaning of seven years behind them.

"When you came that night and told me about Cortlandt, I didn't try to stop you. I knew you had to do it, it was your time to set the terms on which you could go on. This is my time. My Cortlandt explosion. You must let me do it my way. Don't question me. Don't protect me. No matter what I do." "I know what you'll do." "You know that I have to?" "Yes." She bent one arm from the elbow, fingers lifted, in a short, backward jolt, as if tossing the subject over her shoulder. It was settled and not to be discussed.

She slipped down, to sit on the floor, her elbows propped on his knees, she looked up at him and smiled, she knew that she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known.

"Howard...willingly, completely, and always...without reservations, without fear of anything they can do to you or me...in any way you wish...as your wife or your mistress, secretly or openly...here, or in a furnished room I'll take in some town near a jail where I'll see you through a wire net...it won't matter....Howard, if you win the trial--even that won't matter too much. You've won long ago....I'll remain what I am, and I'll remain with you--now and ever--in any way you want...." He held her hands in his, she saw his shoulders sagging down to her, she saw him helpless, surrendered to this moment, as she was--and she knew that even pain can be confessed, but to confess happiness is to stand naked, delivered to the witness, yet they could let each other see it without need of protection.

Don't comment on this. Don't say anything about self-sacrifice or I'll break and...and I'm not quite as strong as that sheriff is probably thinking. I didn't do it for you. I've made it worse for you--I've added scandal to everything else they'll throw at you. But, Howard, now we stand together--against all of them. You'll be a convict and I'll be an adulteress. Howard, do you remember that I was afraid to share you with lunch wagons and strangers' windows? Now I'm not afraid to have this past night smeared all over their newspapers. My darling, do you see why I'm happy and why I'm free?" He said: "I'll never remind you afterward that you're crying, Dominique."

He turned to leave. "God damn you!" she cried. "If you can take it like this, you had no right to become what you became!" "That's why I'm taking it." He walked out of the room. He closed the door softly.

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. But each of them had known some unforgotten moment--a morning when nothing had happened, a piece of music heard suddenly and never heard in the same way again, a stranger's face seen in a bus--a moment when each had known a different sense of living. And each remembered other moments, on a sleepless night, on an afternoon of steady rain, in a church, in an empty street at sunset, when each had wondered why there was so much suffering and ugliness in the world. They had not tried to find the answer and they had gone on living as if no answer were necessary. But each had known a moment when, in lonely, naked honesty, he had felt the need of an answer.

The audience looked at him. They felt he had no chance. They could drop the nameless resentment, the sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people. And so, for the first time, they could see him as he was: a man totally innocent of fear. The fear of which they thought was not the normal kind, not a response to a tangible danger, but the chronic, unconfessed fear in which they all lived. They remembered the misery of the moments when, in loneliness, a man thinks of the bright words he could have said, but had not found, and hates those who robbed him of his courage. The misery of knowing how strong and able one is in one's own mind, the radiant picture never to be made real. Dreams? Self-delusion? Or a murdered reality, unborn, killed by that corroding emotion without name--fear--need--dependence--hatred? Roark stood before them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind. But Roark stood like that before a hostile crowd--and they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible to him. For the flash of an instant, they grasped the manner of his consciousness. Each asked himself: do I need anyone's approval?--does it matter?--am I tied? And for that instant, each man was free--free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room. It was only a moment; the moment of silence when Roark was about to speak.

"That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures--because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer--because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage. "Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received--hatred. The great creators--the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors--stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won. "No creator was prompted by a desire to serve his brothers, for his brothers rejected the gift he offered and that gift destroyed the slothful routine of their lives. His truth was his only motive. His own truth, and his own work to achieve it in his own way. A symphony, a book, an engine, a philosophy, an airplane or a building--that was his goal and his life. Not those who heard, read, operated, believed, flew or inhabited the thing he had created. The creation, not its users. The creation, not the benefits others derived from it. The creation which gave form to his truth. He held his truth above all things and against all men. "His vision, his strength, his courage came from his own spirit. A man's spirit, however, is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego. "The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power--that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served nothing and no one. He had lived for himself. "And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.”

"Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons--a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man--the function of his reasoning mind. "But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. It is a secondary consequence. The primary act--the process of reason--must be performed by each man alone. We can divide a meal among many men. We cannot digest it in a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred. "We inherit the products of the thought of other men. We inherit the wheel. We make a cart. The cart becomes an automobile. The automobile becomes an airplane. But all through the process what we receive from others is only the end product of their thinking. The moving force is the creative faculty which takes this product as material, uses it and originates the next step. This creative faculty cannot be given or received, shared or borrowed. It belongs to single, individual men. That which it creates is the property of the creator. Men learn from one another. But all learning is only the exchange of material. No man can give another the capacity to think. Yet that capacity is our only means of survival. "Nothing is given to man on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways--by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary. "The creator's concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite's concern is the conquest of men. "The creator lives for his work. He needs no other men. His primary goal is within himself. The parasite lives second-hand. He needs others. Others become his prime motive. "The basic need of the creator is independence. The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion. It cannot be curbed, sacrificed or subordinated to any consideration whatsoever. It demands total independence in function and in motive. To a creator, all relations with men are secondary. "The basic need of the second-hander is to secure his ties with men in order to be fed. He places relations first. He declares that man exists in order to serve others. He preaches altruism. "Altruism is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self. "No man can live for another. He cannot share his spirit just as he cannot share his body. But the second-hander has used altruism as a weapon of exploitation and reversed the base of mankind's moral principles. Men have been taught every precept that destroys the creator. Men have been taught dependence as a virtue. "The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption. It is impossible in concept. The nearest approach to it in reality--the man who lives to serve others--is the slave. If physical slavery is repulsive, how much more repulsive is the concept of servility of the spirit? The conquered slave has a vestige of honor. He has the merit of having resisted and of considering his condition evil. But the man who enslaves himself voluntarily in the name of love is the basest of creatures. He degrades the dignity of man

and he degrades the conception of love. But this is the essence of altruism. "Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give. Yet one cannot give that which has not been created. Creation comes before distribution--or there will be nothing to distribute. The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary. Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible. We praise an act of charity. We shrug at an act of achievement. "Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of others. But suffering is a disease. Should one come upon it, one tries to give relief and assistance. To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then man must wish to see others suffer--in order that he may be virtuous. Such is the nature of altruism. The creator is not concerned with disease, but with life. Yet the work of the creators has eliminated one form of disease after another, in man's body and spirit, and brought more relief from suffering than any altruist could ever conceive. "Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone. "Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egotist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge, or act. These are functions of the self. "Here the basic reversal is most deadly. The issue has been perverted and man has been left no alternative--and no freedom. As poles of good and evil, he was offered two conceptions: egotism and altruism. Egotism was held to mean the sacrifice of others to self. Altruism--the sacrifice of self to others. This tied man irrevocably to other men and left him nothing but a choice of pain: his own pain borne for the sake of others or pain inflicted upon others for the sake of self. When it was added that man must find joy in self-immolation, the trap was closed. Man was forced to accept masochism as his ideal--under the threat that sadism was his only alternative. This was the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on mankind. "This was the device by which dependence and suffering were perpetuated as fundamentals of life. "The choice is not self-sacrifice or domination. The choice is independence or dependence. The code of the creator or the code of the second-hander. This is the basic issue. It rests upon the alternative of life or death. The code of the creator is built on the needs of the reasoning mind which allows man to survive. The code of the second-hander is built on the needs of a mind incapable of survival. All that which proceeds from man's independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man's dependence upon men is evil. "The egotist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. He does not function through them. He is not concerned with them in any primary matter. Not in his aim, not in his motive, not in his thinking, not in his desires, not in the source of his energy. He does not exist for any other man--and he asks no other man to exist for him. This is the only form of brotherhood and mutual respect possible between men. "Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man's independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence. "In all proper relationships

there is no sacrifice of anyone to anyone. An architect needs clients, but he does not subordinate his work to their wishes. They need him, but they do not order a house just to give him a commission. Men exchange their work by free, mutual consent to mutual advantage when their personal interests agree and they both desire the exchange. If they do not desire it, they are not forced to deal with each other. They seek further. This is the only possible form of relationship between equals. Anything else is a relation of slave to master, or victim to executioner. "No work is ever done collectively, by a majority decision. Every creative job is achieved under the guidance of a single individual thought. An architect requires a great many men to erect his building. But he does not ask them to vote on his design. They work together by free agreement and each is free in his proper function. An architect uses steel, glass, concrete, produced by others. But the materials remain just so much steel, glass and concrete until he touches them. What he does with them is his individual product and his individual property. This is the only pattern for proper co-operation among men. "The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men. This includes the whole sphere of his creative faculty, his thinking, his work. But it does not include the sphere of the gangster, the altruist and the dictator. "A man thinks and works alone. A man cannot rob, exploit or rule--alone. Robbery, exploitation and ruling presuppose victims. They imply dependence. They are the province of the second-hander. "Rulers of men are not egotists. They create nothing. They exist entirely through the persons of others. Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving. They are as dependent as the beggar, the social worker and the bandit. The form of dependence does not matter. "But men were taught to regard second-handers--tyrants, emperors, dictators--as exponents of egotism. By this fraud they were made to destroy the ego, themselves and others. The purpose of the fraud was to destroy the creators. Or to harness them. Which is a synonym. "From the beginning of history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander responded. He invented altruism. "The creator--denied, opposed, persecuted, exploited--went on, moved forward and carried all humanity along on his energy. The second-hander contributed nothing to the process except the impediments. The contest has another name: the individual against the collective. "The 'common good' of a collective--a race, a class, a state--was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism? Does the fault lie in men's hypocrisy or in the nature of the principle? The most dreadful butchers were the most sincere. They believed in the perfect society reached through the guillotine and the firing squad. Nobody questioned their right to murder since they were murdering for an altruistic purpose. It was accepted that man must be sacrificed for other men. Actors change, but the course of the tragedy remains the same. A humanitarian who starts with declarations of love for mankind and ends with a sea of blood. It goes on and will go on so long as men believe that an action is good if it is unselfish. That permits the altruist to act and forces his victims to bear it. The leaders of collectivist movements ask nothing for themselves. But observe the results. "The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is--Hands off! "Now observe the results of a society built on the principle of

individualism. This, our country. The noblest country in the history of men. The country of greatest achievement, greatest prosperity, greatest freedom. This country was not based on selfless service, sacrifice, renunciation or any precept of altruism. It was based on a man's right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else's. A private, personal, selfish motive. Look at the results. Look into your own conscience. "It is an ancient conflict. Men have come close to the truth, but it was destroyed each time and one civilization fell after another. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

"It is said that I have destroyed the home of the destitute. It is forgotten that but for me the destitute could not have had this particular home. Those who were concerned with the poor had to come to me, who have never been concerned, in order to help the poor. It is believed that the poverty of the future tenants gave them a right to my work. That their need constituted a claim on my life. That it was my duty to contribute anything demanded of me. This is the second-hander's credo now swallowing the world. "I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need. "I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others. "It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing. "I wished to come here and say that the integrity of a man's creative work is of greater importance than any charitable endeavor. Those of you who do not understand this are the men who're destroying the world. "I wished to come here and state my terms. I do not care to exist on any others. "I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society. To my country, I wish to give the ten years which I will spend in jail if my country exists no longer. I will spend them in memory and in gratitude for what my country has been. It will be my act of loyalty, my refusal to live or work in what has taken its place. "My act of loyalty to every creator who ever lived and was made to suffer by the force responsible for the Cortlandt I dynamited. To every tortured hour of loneliness, denial, frustration, abuse he was made to spend--and to the battles he won. To every creator whose name is known--and to every creator who lived, struggled and perished unrecognized before he could achieve. To every creator who was destroyed in body or in spirit. To Henry Cameron. To Steven Mallory. To a man who doesn't want to be named, but who is sitting in this courtroom and knows that I am speaking of him."

"But Mr. Talbot as a man?" asked Ellsworth Toohey. "What's his particular god? What would he go to pieces without?"

When he entered Wynand's office, he knew that he had to accept that pain and carry it forever, mat there was to be no cure and no hope. Wynand sat behind his desk and rose when he entered, looking straight at him. Wynand's face was more than the face of a stranger: a stranger's face is an unapproached potentiality, to be opened if one makes the choice and effort; this was a face known, closed and never to be reached again. A face that held no pain of renunciation, but the stamp of the next step, when even pain is renounced. A face remote and quiet, with a dignity of its own, not a living attribute, but the dignity of a figure on a medieval tomb that speaks of past greatness and forbids a hand to reach out for the remains.

"Mr. Roark, this interview is necessary, but very difficult for me. Please act accordingly." Roark knew that the last act of kindness he could offer was to claim no bond.

"Mankind will never destroy itself, Mr. Wynand. Nor should it think of itself as destroyed. Not so long as it does things such as this." "As what?" "As the Wynand Building." "That is up to you. Dead things--such as the Banner--are only the financial fertilizer that will make it possible. It is their proper function."

"I told you once that this building was to be a monument to my life. There is nothing to commemorate now. The Wynand Building will have nothing--except what you give it." He rose to his feet, indicating that the interview was ended. Roark got up and inclined his head in parting. He held his head down a moment longer than a formal bow required. At the door he stopped and turned. Wynand stood behind his desk without moving. They looked at each other. Wynand said: "Build it as a monument to that spirit which is yours...and could have been mine."

She stopped. She saw an object she had never noticed before. The sight was like the touch of a hand on her forehead, the hand of those figures in legend who had the power to heal. She had not known Henry Cameron and she had not heard him say it, but what she felt now was as if she were hearing it: "And I know that if you carry these words through to the end, it will be a victory, Howard, not just for you, but for something that should win, that moves the world--and never wins acknowledgment. It will vindicate so many who have fallen before you, who have suffered as you will suffer." She saw, on the fence surrounding New York's greatest building, a small tin plate bearing the words: # "Howard Roark, Architect"

#the fountainhead #classic #fiction #books #quotes #ayn rand #literature #howard roark #Dominique francon #objectivism #philosophy

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