 The man who is proudly certain of his own value will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer-because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement not the possession of a brainless slut. The man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises-because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him.If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others, only their rational perception. The person who craves a moral blank check of that kind has dishonest intentions, whether he admits it to himself or not. If you are the kind of reader who knows that for 1084 pages he has lived in the atmosphere of JohnGalt's world — if you now feel regret at the necessity of returning to the gray hopelessness of a culture that is truly bankrupt — if you have understood that it is ideas which create or destroy a world, a culture or a man — if you have understood that the rejection of reason by the neo-mystics of our age is responsible for the present state of the world — then you know why only a philosophy of reason can lead to an intellectual Renaissance. -Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases judgment. -Sherlock Holmes. They reflect the age of cynicism, which cannot comprehend the death of possibilities, fatuous sophisticated indulgence in the parody of the miraculous, decadence whose last refuge is self-ridicule, a mannered helplessness. You saw them, you've known them all your life. You relfect your age differently. You reflect its broken heart.-Interview with the Vampire. Ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear so lovely to it and of a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical. It is requisite for the ideal artist to possess a force of character that seems hardly compatible with its delicacy; he must keep his faith in himself while the incredulous wourld assails him with its utter disbelief; he must stand up against mankind and be his own sole disciple, both as respects his genius and the objects to which it is directed. - N. Hawthorne, The Artist of the Beautiful. In an instant's compass, great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men's whole lives. And so, such hearts, though summary in each one suffering; still, if the gods decree it, in their lifetime aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of instantaneous intensities; for even in their pointless centres, those noble natures contain the entire circumference of inferior souls. -Melville's Moby Dick
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