hank-rearden

...he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.

He saw for the first time that he had never known fear because, against any disaster, he had held the omnipotent cure of being able to act.

He saw the article...which was not an expression of ideas, but a bucket of slime emptied in public__n article that did not contain a single fact, not even an invented one, but poured a stream of sneers and adjectives in which nothing was clear except the filthy malice of denouncing without considering proof necessary.

...there was no guilt in his face, no doubt, nothing but the calm of an inviolate self-confidence.

Thought__e told himself quietly__s a weapon one uses in order to act. No action was possible. Thought is the tool by which one makes a choice. No choice was left to him. Thought sets one__ purpose and the way to reach it. In the matter of his life being torn piece by piece out of him, he was to have no voice, no purpose, no way, no defense.

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer.

There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit__nd if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.