Quotes about Strength

John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains—and he withdrew his fire—until the day when men withdraw their vultures.

A "collective" mind does not exist. It is merely the sum of endless numbers of individual minds. If we have an endless number of individual minds who are weak, meek, submissive and impotent — who renounce their creative supremacy for the sake of the "whole" and accept humbly that the "whole's" verdict — we don't get a collective super-brain. We get only the weak, meek, submissive and impotent collective mind.

Look, Gail. Roark got up, reached out, tore a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end; then, his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing. That's the meaning of life. Your strength? Your work. He tossed the branch aside. The material the earth offers you and what you make of it . . .

The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me.

The Argument from Intimidation is a confession of intellectual impotence.

No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain (Gail Wynand to Dominique Francon)

For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.

Do not let the hero in your soul perish...

I'm not capable of suffering completely. I never have. It goes only down to a certain point and then it stops. As long as there is that untouched point, it's not really pain.

It's not a question of who will allow me to do it, it's a question of who will stop me.

For our face and body were beautiful. Our face was not like the faces of our brothers, for we felt not pity when looking upon it. Our body was not like the bodies of our brothers, for our limbs were straigth and thin and hard and strong. And we thought that we could trust this being who looked upon us from the stream, and that we had nothing to fear with this being.

HOWARD ROARK LAUGHED. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water. The water seemed immovable, the stone flowing. The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion. The stone glowed, wet with sunrays.