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.

There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days-the conviction that ideas matter . . . . That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one's mind matters . . .

Defiance, not obedience, is the American's answer to overbearing authority.

There is no such thing as duty. If you know that a thing is right, you want to do it. If you don't want to do it - it isn't right. If it's right and you don't want to do it - you don't know what right is and you're not a man.

What is a demanding pleasure that demands the use of ones mind! Not in the sense of problem solving, but in the sense of exercising discrimination, judgment, awareness.

You know what you are actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art.

That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth recreating in art.