Hannah H.’s Reviews > The Fountainhead > Status Update

“Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice—run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.”

“That, precisely, is the deadliness of second-handers. They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: ‘Is this true?’ They ask: ‘Is this what others think is true?’ […] Their reality is not within them […] Not an entity, but a relation—anchored to nothing. That’s the emptiness I couldn’t understand in people.

“He’s paying the price and wondering for what sin and telling himself that’s he’s been too selfish. In what act or thought of his has there ever been a self? What was his aim in life? Greatness—in other people’s eyes. Fame, admiration, envy—all that which comes from others. Others dictated his convictions, which he did not hold, but he was satisfied that others believed he held them.”

“He thought that she owed him nothing, or every kind of anger and scorn she could command; and yet there was a human obligation she still had toward him: she owed him evidence of strain in this meeting. There was none.”

“To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That’s what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul—would you understand why that’s much harder?”

“‘There’s so much nonsense about human inconstancy and the transience of all emotions,’ said Wynand. ‘I’ve always thought that a feeling which changes never existed in the first place. There are books I liked at the age of sixteen. I still like them.’”

“…they should realize that the worst curse of poverty was the lack of privacy; only the very rich or the very poor of the city could enjoy their summer vacations […]; the people of good taste and small income had no place to go, if they found no rest or pleasure in herds. Why was it assumed that poverty gave one the instincts of cattle?”

“So he felt anger that he should find exultation only in the wilderness, that this great sense of hope had to be lost when he would return to men and men’s work. He thought that this was not right; that man’s work should be a higher step, an improvement on nature, not a degradation. He did not want to despise men; he wanted to love and admire them.”

“The young man hoped he would not die. Not if the earth could look like this, he thought. Not if he could hear the hope and the promise like a voice, with leaves, tree trunks and rocks instead of words. But he knew that the earth looked like this only because he had seen no sign of men for hours; he was alone […], where he could feel the fresh wonder of an untouched world.”

“Do you mind… if we just sit here for a little while longer… and not talk about that… but just talk, as if everything were right… just an armistice for half and hour out of years…. Tell me what you’ve done every day you’ve been here, everything you can remember….”