Quotes about Integrity

In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube.

I love this work. I want to see it erected. I want to make it real, living, functioning, built. But every living thing is integrated. Do you know what that means? Whole, pure, complete, unbroken. Do you know what constitutes an integrating principle? A thought. The one thought, the single thought that created the thing and every part of it.

Integrity does not consist of loyalty to ones subjective whims, but of loyalty to rational principles

Throughout his life, whenever he became convinced that a course of action was right, the desire to follow it had come automatically.

Thus, if a man is attracted to a woman of intelligence, confidence and strength, if he is attracted to a heroine, he reveals one kind of soul; if, instead, he is attracted to an irresponsible, helpless scatterbrain, whose weakness enables him to feel masculine, he reveals another kind of soul; if he is attracted to a frightened slut, whose lack of judgment and standards allows him to feel free of reproach, he reveals another kind of soul.

The excuse, given in all such cases, is that the "compromise" is only temporary and that one will reclaim one's integrity at some indeterminate future date. But one cannot correct a husband's or wife's irrationality by giving in to it and encouraging it to grow. One cannot achieve the victory of one's ideas by helping to propagate their opposite.

Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.

Have you always liked being Howard Roark?" Roark smiled. The smile was amused, astonished, involuntarily contemptuous.

Be conscious of God and speak always the truth

And then there was the unsettling fact that, despite whatever my mother might claim, the bullies, cheats, and self-promoters seemed to be doing quite well, while those she considered good and decent people seemed to get screwed an awful lot.

If we aren't willing to pay a price for our values, if we aren't willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.

We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard.