"Others were his motive power and his prime concern. He didn't want to be great, but to be thought great. He didn't want to build, but to be thought a great builder. He borrowed from others in order to make an impression on others. There's your actual selflessness. It's his ego he's betrayed and given up. But everyone calls him selfish."
"A truly selfish man cannot be affected by the approval of others. He doesn't need it."
"There is no substitute for competence."
"If one doesn't respect oneself one can have neither love nor respect for others."
"We have come to hold, in a kind of mawkish stupor, that greatness is to be judged by self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice, we drool, is the ultimate virtue. Is sacrifice a virtue? Can a man sacrifice his integrity? His honor? His freedom? His ideal? His convictions? The honesty of his feelings? The independence of his thought? But these are a man's supreme possessions. Anything he gives up for them is not a sacrifice but an easy bargain. Should we not, then, stop preaching dangerous and vicious nonsense? Self-sacrifice? But 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."
In the preceding passages Rand explains more clearly what she means by "selfishness" and why it is the most ethical way a man can live.
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