It’s a parity. Ayn Rand is poking fun of the kind of meaningless drivel, psychological-dependents mouth when they attempt to garner the approval of others and try to sound profound.
The quote is from page 200 of the Fountainhead.
Given the context of the paragraphs just before this one a point for point contrast can be made between the circumstances Keating’s undeserved “success,” & the above quoted speech, and what Roark is thinking as he embarks on what will be the low point of his life, i.e, his sentence of hard labor in the quarry.
By conventional standards, this is the darkest moment of Roark’s life up to this point; and at the same time, Keating’s brightest success: compare what Holcombe is celebrating, in contrast to what Roark is thinking.
The distance had flattened the city. The single shafts stood immeasurably tall, out of scale to the rest of the earth. They were of their own world, and they held up to the sky the statement of what man had conceived and made possible. They were empty molds. But man had come so far; he could go farther. The city on the edge of the sky held a question—and a promise.
“But man had come so far; he could go farther.”
What does Holcombe say,
“We are the guardians of a great human function.”
He thinks of himself as a guardian of what was, as if there was no improving on the past; as if the greatest achievements are long since behind men, and all that’s left for men to do is to circle the wagons and protect the a “human function.”
Note: Ayn Rand thought the purpose of Art (Architecture being an Art), as to project how things might be and ought to be; to take a particular artistic medium, and "shape it in the image of one’s values; so that one could not just “seek” some goal never to be reach, but to objectify one’s values, in the here and now and to experience, in art, what one’s future ideal would look like.
Holcombe says, 'We are only men and we are only seekers."
The phrase “we are only men…” is very telling. Roark would never say he is “only” a man, as if there was something greater to be besides a lowly “man.” Roark would say, I am a man, therefore, everything is possible!
Roark would not say, he is “only a seeker,” ever seeking but never reaching his goals; as if achieving our goals is something out of reach and only to be perpetually yearned for.
Contrast this with Roark’s speech in the court room where he describes what he receives in payment for giving his plans to Keating. He says that he likes to be pay for his work, but in this case, if his building is finished, he will achieve what no other man can “give him,” he will have built, actualized, objectified his values in reality.
(parody? 
)
Yes! Thank you. I guess “I am only a man, only a seeker of perfect spelling and English usage.” LOL :unsure: