You'll get everything society can give a man. You'll keep all the money. You'll take any fame or honor anyone might want to grant. You'll accept such gratitude as the tenants might feel. And I - I'll take what nobody can give a man, except himself. I will have built Cortlandt. - Howard Roark

The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard.

A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.

The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently; they are most helplessly in its power.

I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence.

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

The causes of illusions are not pretty to discover. They're either vicious or tragic.