Quotes About Integrity

Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame.

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit." (Atlas Shrugged)

You have been paying blackmail, not for your vices, but for your virtues.

I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively—or blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show—or for deafness, I have too much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone's heart—only by someone's head.

If you want to defeat any kind of vicious fraud—comply with it literally, adding nothing of your own to disguise its nature.

it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed. It is the unsacrificed self that we must respect in man above all.

You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running.

For the We must never be spoken, save by one's choice and as a second thought. This word must never be placed first within a man's soul, else it becomes a monster, the root of all evils on earth, the root of man's torture by men, and an unspeakable lie.

honest people were never touchy about the matter of being trusted.

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked.

People who are afraid to sacrifice somebody have no business talking about a common purpose.

Any man who's afraid of hiring the best ability he can find, is a cheat who's in a business where he doesn't belong. To me—the foulest man on earth, more contemptible than a criminal, is the employer who rejects men for being too good.

Dagny, how did you do it? How did you manage to remain unmangled?" "By holding to just one rule." "Which?" "To place nothing—nothing—above the verdict of my own mind." "You've taken some terrible beatings . . . maybe worse than I did . . . worse than any of us. . . . What held you through it?" "The knowledge that my life is the highest of values, too high to give up without a fight.

Man's motive power is his moral code.

If they believe that the purpose of my life is to serve them, let them try to enforce their creed. If they believe that my mind is their property—let them come and get it." "But what sort of life have you chosen? To what purpose are you giving your mind?" "To the cause of my love." "Which is what?" "Justice.

It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world's doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries—to remain human, since the human is the rational.

They kept their secret from the knowledge of others, not as a shameful guilt, but as a thing that was immaculately theirs, beyond anyone's right of debate or appraisal.

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.

Self-sacrifice, we drool, is a virtue. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feeling? The independence of his thoughts? But these are a man's supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain.

The man who lies to the world, is the world's slave from then on.

One does not bargain over inches of evil.

The theme is the evil of divorcing ideals from life.

You honest men are such a problem and such a headache. But we knew you'd slip sooner or later—and this is just what we wanted. You seem to be pleased about it. Don't I have good reason to be? But, after all, I did break one of your laws. Well, what do you think they're for?

I really believe that a building is a unit, not a city, so that city planning should not control all buildings. Because a house can be the product of one man, but a city cannot. And nothing collective can have the unity and integrity of a "unit.")