The ' pleasure' of being drunk is obviously the pleasure of escaping from the responsibility of Consciousness.

A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness-non-existence-as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw-the zero.

p.61 He [Roark] was usually disliked, from the first sight of his face, anywhere he went. His face was closed like the door of a safety vault; things locked in safety vaults are valuable; men did not care to feel that. He was a cold, disquieting presence in the room; his presence had a strange quality: it made itself felt and yet it made them feel that he was not there; or perhaps that he was and they weren't.

Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

When personal judgment is inoperative (or forbidden), men's first concern is not how to choose, but how to justify their choice

A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.

She thought: at this moment, the glass stem between his fingers feels just like the one between mine. We have this much in common.