a book
The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand · 1996 · 754 pages
recommended by 25 people
sourced from public statements
Nassim Taleb
“Consider the Ayn Rand phenomenon: her books Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead have been read for more than half a century by millions of people, in spite of, or most likely thanks to, brutally nasty reviews and attempts to discredit her.”

Mark Cuban
“It encouraged me to think as an individual, take risks to reach my goals, and responsibility for my successes and failures. I loved it.”↗

Kevin Kelly
“I got sucked into reading this over-the-top manifesto of self-reliance during finals of my first year of college. By the end of the book, I decided to drop out of school. I never returned. It was the best decision of my life.”↗

Larry Ellison
“As a kid, I wanted to be an architect. That's before I read The Fountainhead. I mean it is hard to find a profession that pays worse than architecture.”↗

Bradley Cooper
“The characters were insane. Howard Roark, man.”↗

Hunter S. Thompson
“HST speaking to childhood friend Joe Bell: “To say what I thought of The Fountainhead would take me more pages than I like to think I’d stoop to boring someone with. I think it’s enough to say that I think it’s everything you said it was and more. Naturally, I intend to read Atlas Shrugged. If it’s half as good as Rand’s first effort, I won’t be disappointed.””↗

Travis Kalanick
“It’s one of my favorite books. It’s less of a political statement. It’s just personally one of my favorite books. I’m a fan of architecture.”↗

Jesse Williams
“The protagonist’s audacious self-confidence and refusal to compromise his artistic vision—which was to say, himself—was a fascinating thing to survey.”↗

Jimmy Wales
“I think for me one of the core things that is very applicable to my life today is the virtue of independence - is the vision, you know, if you know the idea of Howard Roark who is the architect in The Fountainhead, who has a vision for what he wants to accomplish and, there's some time in the book when he is frustrated in his career because people don't want to build the type of buildings he wants to build. And he's given a choice, a difficult choice, to compromise his integrity or to essentially go out of business. And he has to go and take a job working in a quarry. And for me that model has a lot of resonance. When I think about what I'm doing and the way I'm doing it is more important to me than any amount of money or anything like that because it's my artistic work.”↗

Vince Vaughn
“Defiant in its pursuit of one’s artistic goals, meaning you don’t compromise; you stay truthful to what you’re exploring.”↗














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