Because I couldn't bear the thought of her so much as touching another man, I feared it all the time, and I saw intimacy in the most casual movement of her hand.

All the giants of the spirit whom I've broken. I don't think anybody ever realized how much I enjoyed doing it. It's a kind of lust. I'm perfectly indifferent to slugs like Ellsworth Toohey or my friend Alvah, and quite willing to leave them in peace. But just let me see a man of a slightly higher dimension—and I've got to make a sort of Toohey out of him. I've got to. It's like a sex urge.

Love of our brothers? That's when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives. We began to hate them for every meal they swallowed, for every small pleasure they enjoyed, for one man's new shirt, for another's wife's hat, for an outing with their family for a paint job on their house--it was taken from us, it was paid for by our privations, our denials, our hunger.

Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good-fortune.

What is described in Scripture as the basic sin, the sin of taking things into your own hands, being your own god, grabbing what is there while you can get it, is now described as basic wisdom: improve yourself by whatever means you are able; get ahead regardless of the price, take care of me first.

The sinful nature is all about self: pleasing self, promoting self, preserving self. Sin is selfish.

The professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.

professional learns to recognize envy-driven criticism and to take it for what it is: the supreme compliment. The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts.

But if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, do not boast and lie against the truth.

Nevertheless, faithfully interrogate your own souls, whether ye have not been unduly puffed up by your integrity, and continence, and chastity; and whether ye have not been so desirous of the human praise that is accorded to these virtues, that ye have envied some who possessed them.

Money brings jealousy and bitterness.

Selfishness is the only real atheism aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion.