Man's only power - his MIND

Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons - a process of though. From this simple necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

Love and self-respect

If one doesn't respects oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others.

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

Ayn Rand's one sentence stand against socialism

I think the only cardinal evil on earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men.

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

Roark differentiates between parasitic 'second-handers' and 'individualists'

That, precisely, is the deadlines of second-handers. They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They're concerned only with people. They don't ask: 'Is it true?' They ask: 'Is this what others think is true?' Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egotists. You don't think through another's brain and you don't work thorough another's hands. When you suspend your faculty of of independent judgement, you suspend your consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation - anchored to nothing. That's the emptiness I couldn't understand in people.

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

Money is only a means to some end

Now I don't see anything evil in a desire to make money. But money is only a means to some end. If a man wants it for a personal purpose - to invest in his industry, to create, to study, to travel, to enjoy luxury - he's completely moral. But the men who place money first go much beyond that. Personal luxury is a limited endeavor. What they want is ostentation: to show, to stun, to entertain, to impress others.

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

Hater of mankind

[...] the pig is the symbol of love for humanity - the creature that accepts anything. As a matter of fact, the person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him.

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

Dominique Francon talks about self-respect

It's said that the worst thing one can do to a man is to kill his self-respect. But that's not true. Self-respect is something that can't be killed. The worst thing is to kill a man's pretense at it.

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

Gail Wynand knows the truth

Men differ in their virtues, if any, but they are all alike in their vices.

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

Socialism vs Love & Sex

Personal love is a great evil - as everything personal. And it always lead to misery. Don't you see why? Personal love is an act of injustice - to every being on earth whom you rob of the affection arbitrarily granted to one. You must love all men equally. But you cannot achieve so noble an emotion if you don't kill your selfish little choices. They are vicious and futile - since they contradict the first cosmic law - the basic equality of all men.

You missed the beautiful pride of utter selfishness. Only when you learn to deny your ego, completely, only when you learn to be amused by such piddling sentimentalities as your little sex urges - only then will you achieve the greatness which I have always expected of you.

The point I wish to make is only that one must mistrust one's most personal impulses. What one desires is actually of so little importance.

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

Some socialist views of Ellsworth M. Toohey that are surprisingly actual today in the West

- Speaking anatomically  the heart is our most valuable organ. The brain is a superstition.

- In spiritual matters there is a simple, infallible test: everything that proceeds from the ego is evil; everything that proceeds from from love for others is good.

- The worst folk song is superior to the best symphony.

- A man braver than his brothers insults them by implication. Let us aspire to no virtue which cannot be shared.

- I have yet to see a genius or a hero who, if stuck with a burning match, would feel less pain than his undistinguished average brother.

- Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.

- We are all brothers under the skin - and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

Ellsworth M. Toohey about a human's face as an expression of his soul

There's nothing as significant as a human face. Nor as eloquent. We can never really know another person, except by our first glance at him. Because in that glance we know everything. Even though we're not always wise enough to unravel the knowledge.

Have you ever heard of the style of a soul? [...] Do you remember the famous philosopher who spoke of the style of civilization? He called it 'style'. He said it was the nearest word he could find for it. He said that every civilization has its own basic principle, one single, supreme, determining conception, and every endeavor of men within that civilization is true, unconsciously and irrevocably, to that one principle... I think that every human soul has a style of its own, also. Its one basic theme. You'll see it reflected in every thought, every act, every wish of that person. The one absolute, the one imperative in that living creature. Years of studying a man won't show it to you. His face will. You'd have to write volumes to describe a person. Think of his face. You need nothing else.

Ayn Rand -  The Fountainhead

Ellsworth M. Toohey mocks British Empire

When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel.

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

Liberty according to Dominique Francon

To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead

First hint at Rand's philosophy

His view of the world was simple: there were the able and there were the incompetent; he was not concerned with the latter.

Ayn Rand - The Fountainhead