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.

You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed.

If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.

Let no man posture as an advocate of peace if he proposes or supports any social system that initiates the use of force against individual men, in any form.

Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life.

But I don't think of you. - Howard Roark

Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: 'Account Overdrawn.'