From the moment of birth, at every level, human beings who are more alike than different become polarized into two absolutely exclusive classes with very different and ill-distributed symbolic powers.

A line, once crossed, can never be uncrossed.

Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, doubtless two of the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions.

You don't have to want death in order to prepare for it.

our lives are stories we tell ourselves.

Poor and afflicted and oppressed people have faces, and we are required to look squarely into them. We can't love what we won't experience.

If only we could have them back as babies today, now that we have some idea what to do with them.