Gail Wynand Quotes

Why have you been staring at me ever since we met? Because I’m not the Gail Wynand you’d heard about. You see, I love you. And love is exception-making. If you were in love you’d want to be broken, trampled, ordered, dominated, because that’s the impossible, in the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you’d want to offer the man you loved. But it wouldn’t be easy for you.

No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain (Gail Wynand to Dominique Francon)

I love you, Dominique. I love you so much that nothing can matter to me—not even you. Can you understand that? Only my love—not your answer. Not even your indifference.

You’re so beautiful, Dominique. Its such a lovely accident on God’s part that there’s one person who matches inside and out.

It’s easier to donate a few thousands to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It’s simple to seek substitutes for competence—such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.

To what level of depravity has a society descended when it condemns a man simply because he is strong and great?

Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky - under each bulb - down to there, see that spark over the river which is not a star? - there are people whom you will never see and who are your masters. At the supper tables, in the drawing rooms, in their beds and in their cellars, in their studies and in their bathrooms. Speeding in the subways under your feet. Crawling up in elevators through vertical cracks around you. Jolting past you in every bus. Your masters, Gail Wynand. There is a net - longer than the cables that coil through the walls of this city, larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water, gas and refuse - there is another hidden net around you; it is strapped to you, and the wires lead to every hand in the city. They jerked the wires and you moved. You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends.

If lightning strikes a rotten tree and it collapses, it’s not the fault of the lightning.

If it were true, that old legend about appearing before a supreme judge and naming one’s record, I would offer, with all my pride, not any act I committed, but one thing I have never done on this earth: that I never sought an outside sanction. I would stand and say: I am Gail Wynand, the man who has committed every crime except the foremost one: that of ascribing futility to the wonderful act of existence and seeking justification beyond myself. This is my pride: that now, thinking of the end, I don not cry like all the men of my age: but what was the use and the meaning? I was the use and meaning. I, Gail Wynand. That I lived and that I acted.

When the name of Gail Wynand became a threat in the publishing world, a group of newspaper owners took him aside-at a city charity affair which all had to attend-and reproached him for what they called hid debasement of the public taste. "It is not my function" said Wynand, "to help people preserve a self-respect they haven't got. You give them what they profess to like in public, I give them what they really like. Honesty is the best policy, gentlemen, though not quite in the sense you were taught to belive".

He seemed as graciously at home as in the best restaurants of the city; his elegance had an odd quality here—it did not insult the place, but seemed to transform it, like the presence of a king who never alters his manner, yet makes a palace of any house he enters.

Notice how they’ll accept anything except a man who stands alone. They recognize him at once...There’s a special, insidious kind of hatred for him. They forgive criminals. They admire dictators. Crime and violence are a tie. A form of mutual dependence. They need ties. They’ve got to force their miserable little personalities on every single person they meet. The independent man kills them—because they don’t exist within him and that’s the only form of existence they know. Notice the malignant kind of resentment against any idea that propounds independence. Notice the malice toward an independent man.

Men differ in their virtues, if any,” said Gail Wynand, explaining his policy, “but they are alike in their vices.

It was a strange glance; she had noticed it before; a glance of simple worship. And it made her realize that there is a stage of worship which makes the worshiper himself an object of reverence.

Let’s stop and think for a moment. 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 thought?

What's he so damn arrogant about? Just because he made that fortune himself? Does he have to be such a damn snob just because he came from Hell's Kitchen? It isn't other people's fault if they weren't lucky enough to be born in Hell's Kitchen to rise out of! Nobody understands what a terrible handicap it is to be born rich. Because people just take for granted that because you were born that way you'd just be no good if you weren't. What I mean is if I'd had Gail Wynand's breaks, I'd be twice as rich as he is by now and three times as famous. But he's so conceited he doesn't realize this at all!

..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.

Most people build as they live—as a matter of routine and senseless accident. But a few understand that building is a great symbol. We live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form. For the man who understands this, a house he owns is a statement of his life. If he doesn’t build, when he has the means, it’s because his life has not been what he wanted.

He telephoned half an hour ago. Mr. Gail Wynand.

She sat looking at him as she always did; her glance had tenderness without scorn and sadness without pity.

Wynand asked: “Howard, have you ever been in love?” Roark turned to look straight at him and answer quietly: “I still am.” “But when you walk through a building, what you feel is greater than that?” “Much greater, Gail.

Wynand, the man who has committed every crime except the foremost one: that of ascribing futility to the wonderful fact of existence and seeking justification beyond myself. This is my pride: that now, thinking of the end, I do not cry like all the men of my age: but what was the use and the meaning? I was the use and meaning, I, Gail Wynand. That I lived and that I acted. He drove to the foot of the hill and slammed

I don’t care. That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean, the Banner is becoming a kind of liability. It hurts business. One’s got to be so careful nowadays. You get tied up with the wrong people and first thing you know there’s a smear campaign going on and you get splashed too. I can’t afford that sort of thing.” “It’s not entirely an unjustified smear.” “I don’t care. I don’t give a damn whether it’s true or not. Who am I to stick my neck out for Gail Wynand? If there’s a public sentiment against him, my job is to get as far away as I can, pronto. And I’m not the only one. There’s a bunch of us who’re thinking the same. Jim Ferris of Ferris & Symes, Billy Shultz of Vimo Flakes, Bud Harper of Toddler Togs, and ... hell, you know them all, they’re all your friends, our bunch, the liberal businessmen. We all want to yank our ads out of the Banner.

I have never been able to enjoy it before, the sight of the earth, it's such a great background, but it has no meaning except as a background, and I thought of those who owned it and then it hurt me too much. I can love it now. They don't own it. They own nothing. They've never won. I have seen the life of Gail Wynand, and now I know. One cannot hate the earth in their name. The earth is beautiful. And it is a background, but not theirs.

The light came from the window of a pawnshop. The shop was closed, but a glaring bulb hung there to discourage looters who might be reduced to this. He stopped and looked at it. He thought, the most indecent sight on earth, a pawnshop window. The things which had been sacred to men, and the things which had been precious, surrendered to the sight of all, to the pawing and the bargaining, trash to the indifferent eyes of strangers, the equality of a junk heap, typewriters and violins-the tools of dreams, old photographs and wedding rings-the tags of love, together with soiled trousers, coffee pots, ash trays, pornographic plaster figures; the refuse of despair, pledge, not sold, not cut off in clean finality, but hocked to a stillborn hope, never to be redeemed. 'Hello, Gail Wynand,' he said to the things in the window, and walked on.

Howard Roark looked up at the tiled vault. He had never hated anyone. Somewhere in this building was its owner, the man who had made him feel his nearest approach to hatred. Gail Wynand glanced at the small clock on his desk.

Howard Roark looked up at the tiled vault. He had never hated anyone. Somewhere in this building was its owner, the man who had made him feel his nearest approach to hatred. Gail Wynand glanced at the small clock on his desk. In a few minutes he had an appointment with an architect. The interview, he thought, would not be difficult; he had held many such interviews in his life; he merely had to speak, he knew what he wanted to say, and nothing was required of the architect except a few sounds signifying understanding.

But all the things of which I was proud will remain. After I am gone that building will be Gail Wynand.... I knew I’d find the right architect when the time came. I didn’t know he would be much more than just an architect I hired. I’m glad it happened this way. It’s a kind of reward. It’s as if I had been forgiven. My last and greatest achievement will also be your greatest. It will be not only my monument but the best gift I could offer to the man who means most to me on earth.

enough to be born in Hell’s Kitchen to rise out of! Nobody understands what a terrible handicap it is to be born rich. Because people just take for granted that because you were born that way you’d just be no good if you weren’t. What I mean is if I’d had Gail Wynand’s breaks, I’d be twice as rich as he is by now and three times as famous. But he’s so conceited he doesn’t realize this at all!

In the filthy howling now going on all around us,” said an editorial in the Banner, signed “Gail Wynand” in big letters, “nobody seems to remember that Howard Roark surrendered himself of his own free will. If he blew up that building—did he have to remain at the scene to be arrested? But we don’t wait to discover his reasons. We have convicted him without a hearing. We want him to be guilty. We are delighted with this case. What you hear is not indignation—it’s gloating. Any illiterate maniac, any worthless moron who commits some revolting murder, gets shrieks of sympathy from us and marshals an army of humanitarian defenders. But a man of genius is guilty by definition. Granted that it is a vicious injustice to condemn a man simply because he is weak and small. To what level of depravity has a society descended when it condemns a man simply because he is strong and great? Such, however, is the whole moral atmosphere of our century—the century of the second-rater.