Quotes About Virtue

Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.

A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue.

Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one's consciousness can permit the faking of existence.

When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.

Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man's independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence.

A building has integrity just like a man. And just as seldom.

There's nothing of any importance in life - except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard.

Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are commiting an act of virtue.

Married people dont look like they have bedrooms on their minds when they look at each other. In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both...Not both.

Let us destroy, but don't let us pretend that we are committing an act of virtue.

To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake - and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.

To me-the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the man who rejects men for being too good.

Rationality is man's basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues. Man's basic vice, the source of all evils, is the act of unfocussing his mind, the suspension of his conciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man's means of survival and therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction; that is anti-mind, anti-life.

You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed.

You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes.

Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egotist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.

The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice,' but integrity.

A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A viler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to demand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the furnace, besides.

You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, and you have wished it, and I-I am the man who has granted you your wish. John Galt's Speech

But we, Equality 7-2521, are glad to be living. If this is a vice, then we wish no virtue.

When I die, I hope to go to heaven-- whatever the hell that is-- and I want to be able to afford the price of admission, Virtue is the price of admission. Jim said haughtily. That's what I mean, James. So I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all-- that I was a man who made money. Any grafter can make money. James, you ought to discover some day that words have an exact meaning.

But he still thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise; he had learned only that they did.

The word We is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it, and that which is white and that which is black are lost equally in the grey of it. It is the word by which the depraved steal the virtue of the good, by which the weak steal the might of the strong, by which the fools steal the wisdom of the sages

Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices