"She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if the vandal who sm..."
- Ayn Rand
"The justice which would forgive miles of innocent errors of knowledge, would not forgive a single step taken in conscious evil."
"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."
"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."
"Thought—he told himself quietly—is a weapon one uses in order to act. No action was possible. Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice. No choice was left to him. Thought sets one’s purpose and..."
"...there was no guilt in his face, no doubt, nothing but the calm of an inviolate self-confidence."
"He saw the article...which was not an expression of ideas, but a bucket of slime emptied in public—an article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a stream of sneer..."
"...he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act."
"He saw for the first time that he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act."
"...he had acquired the conviction that one had to concern oneself with the rational, not the insane—that one had to seek that which was right, because the right answer always won—that the senseless, t..."