The Fountainhead Quotes

“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.”
― Ayn Rand , The Fountainhead

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“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.”
― Ayn Rand

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“I like to receive money for my work. But I can pass that up this time. I like to have people know my work is done by me. But I can pass that up. I like to have tenants made happy by my work. But that doesn't matter too much. 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.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“The crowd would have forgiven anything, except a man who could remain normal under the vibrations of its enormous collective sneer.”
― Ayn Rand

“They talked about nothing in particular, sentences that had meaning only in the sound of the voices, in warm gaiety, in the ease of complete relaxation.”
― Ayn Rand

“I don’t make comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse to measure myself as part of anything. I’m an utter egotist.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“You love your work. God help you, you love it! And thats the curse. That's the brand on your forehead for all of them to see. You love it and they know it, and they know they have you. Do you ever look at the people in the street? Aren't you afraid of them? I am. They move past you and they wear hats and they carry bundles. But that's not the substance of them. The substance of them is hatred for any man who loves his work. That's the only kind they fear. I don't know why”
― Ayn Rand

“A man’s spirit is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Before Ayn Rand coined the term “objectivists”, we just called them “selfish assholes”.”
― James Rozoff

“...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.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“She wondered why her normal desire to say little, to hold things closed, broke down before him, why she felt compelled to simple frankness, such as she could offer no one else.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“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?”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“If lightning strikes a rotten tree and it collapses, it’s not the fault of the lightning.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“You’re the most egotistical and the kindest man I know. And that doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe the concepts don’t make sense. Maybe they don’t mean what people have been taught to think they mean.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“She came back many days later. She saw him, unexpectedly, on a flat stretch of stone before
her, by the side of the path. She stopped short. She did not want to come too close. It was
strange to see him before her, without the defence and excuse of distance.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“The human spirit. The heroic in man. The aspiration and the fulfillment, both. Uplifted in its quest--and uplifting by its own essence. Seeking God--and finding itself. Showing that there is no higher reach beyond its own form....”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Roark, floating like a piece of driftwood, held a power greater than that of the engine in the belly of the yacht. Wynand thought: Because that is the power from which the engine has come.”
― Ayn Rand

“I'd rather be kind than right.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“She tried to demonstrate her power over him. She stayed away from his house; she waited for him to come to her. He spoiled it by coming too soon; by refusing her the satisfaction of knowing that he waited and struggled against his desire; by surrendering at once.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. 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.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“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.”
― Ayn Rand

“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.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“They all work so hard and struggle and suffer, trying to achieve beauty, trying to surpass one another in beauty. Let's surpass them all! Let's throw their sweat in their face. Let's destroy them at one stroke. Let's be gods. Let's be ugly.”
― Ayn Rand