Playground Blues

Highlights

He explained why an honest building, like an honest man, had to be of one piece and one faith; what constituted the life source, the idea in any existing thing or creature, and why -- if one smallest part committed treason to that idea -- the thing or the creature was dead; and why the good, the high and the noble on earth was only that which kept its integrity.

— p. 195

You know Ellsworth, I think the man who designed this should have committed suicide. A man who can conceive a thing asw beautiful as this should never allow it to be erected. He should not want it to exist. But he will let it be built, so that women will hang diapers on his terraces, so that men will spit on his stairways and draw dirty pictures on his walls. He's given it to them and he's made it part of them, part of everything. He shouldn't have offered it for men like you to look at for men like you to talk about. He's defiled his own work but the first word you'll utter about it. He's made himself worse than you are. ...

— p. 249

Howard Roark built a temple to the human spirit. He saw man as strong, proud, clean, wise and fearless. He saw man as a heroic being. And he built a temple to that. A temple is a place where man is to experience exaltation. He thought that exaltation comes from the consciousness of being guiltless, of seeing the truth and achieving it, of living up to one's highest possibility, of knowing no shame and having no cause for shame, of being able to stand naked in full sunlight. ...

It is an ancient conflict. Men have come close to the truth, but it was destroyed each time and one civilization fell after another. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

— p. 715