The quickest way to kill the human spirit is to ask someone to do mediocre work. - Ayn Rand

I don't believe it matters to me- that they're going to destroy it. Maybe it hurts so much that I don't even know I'm hurt. But I don't think so. If you want to carry it for my sake, don't carry more than I do. 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.

Where does it stop?

Where I can think of nothing and feel nothing except that I designed that temple. I built it. Nothing else can seem very important.

You shouldn't have built it. You shouldn't have delivered it to the sort of thing they're doing.

That doesn't mater. Not even that they'll destroy it. Only that it had existed.

Selfishness does not mean only to do things for one's self. One may do things, affecting others, for his own pleasure and benefit. This is not immoral, but the highest of morality.

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.