Toohey Quotes & Sayings

She turned to him. "Hello, Peter."

"You know Peter Keating of course?" Toohey smiled at her.

"Oh, yes. Peter was in love with me once."

"You're using the wrong tense, Dominique," said Keating. — Ayn Rand

No," said Toohey. "You ask what he'd do if he couldn't be an architect."
"He'd walk over corpses. Any and all of them. All of us. But he'd be an architect. — Ayn Rand

Mr. Roark, we're alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us." "But I don't think of you." Toohey — Ayn Rand

It's such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don't even know that you're being subtle and vicious — Ayn Rand

His life was crowded , public and impersonal as a city square. The friend of humanity had no single private friend. People came to him; he came close to no one. He accepted all. His affection was golden, smooth and even, like a great expanse of sand; there was no wind of discrimination to raise dunes; the sands lay still and the sun stood high.
Toohey. — Ayn Rand

You know, Ellsworth,' Keating said, leaning forward, happy in an uneasy kind of way, 'I'd rather talk to you than do anything else, anything at all. I had so many places to go tonight
and I'm so much happier sitting here with you. Sometimes I wonder how I'd ever go on without you.'
'That,' said Toohey, 'is as it should be. Or else what are friends for? — Ayn Rand

Then Toohey moved through the crowd, and smiled at his friends. But between smiles and sentences, his eyes went back to the man with the orange hair. He looked at the man as he looked occasionally at the pavement from a window on the thirtieth floor, wondering about his own body were it to be hurled down and what would happen when it struck against that pavement. He did not know the man's name, his profession or his past; he had no need to know; it was not a man to him, but only a force; Toohey never saw men. Perhaps it was the fascination of seeing that particular force so explicitly personified in a human body. — Ayn Rand

Toohey: "Mr. Roark, we're alone here. Why don't you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us."
Roark: "But I don't think of you. — Ayn Rand

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. — Ayn Rand

The basic trouble with the modern world ... is the intellectual fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. To solve the gigantic problems crushing the world today, we must clarify our mental confusion. We must acquire a philosophical perspective. In essence, freedom and compulsion are one. Let me give you a simple illustration. Traffic lights restrain your freedom to cross a street whenever you wish. But this restraint gives you the freedom from being run over by a truck. If you were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would restrain the freedom of your career. But it would give you freedom from the fear of unemployment. Whenever a new compulsion is forced upon us, we automatically gain a new freedom. The two are inseparable. Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve total freedom. — Ayn Rand