Is it advisable to spread out all the conveniences of culture before people to whom a few steps up a stair to a library is a sufficient deterrent from reading?

Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection, and the base of a moral existence.

Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.

And what is the state but a servant and a convenience for a large number of people, just like the electric light and the plumbing system? And wouldnt it be preposterous to claim that men must exist for their plumbing, not the plumbing for the men.

She felt a board indifference toward the immediate world around her toward other children and adults alike. She took it as a regrettable accident to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened to be imprisoned among people who were dull. She had caught a glimpse of another world and she knew it existed somewhere, the world that had created trains, bridges, telegraph wires and signal lights winking in the night. She had to wait she thought, and grow up to that world. - Dagny Taggart

To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality.

but their eyes were as cold blue glass buttons.