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

Who one believes God to be is most accurately revealed not in any credo but in the way one speaks to God when no one else is listening.

A line, once crossed, can never be uncrossed.

The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time. And if you live long enough, as you're increasingly likely to do, you may well join it.

Through its prohibition on birth control, the Church has suggested that the only right way to have children is through biological reproduction: a kind of forced labor culminating in the production of another soul for God. What kind of a God stands like Lee Iacocca at the end of an assembly line, driving his workers with a greedy 'More! More!' while the automobiles pile up in showrooms and on freeways and in used-car lots and finally junkyards, his only satisfaction the gross production figures at the end of every quarter?

Do others, I wondered, "see things as I do? I do not think so, for if they did they would not still be alive." And, life-threatening though my vision seemed, I would not repudiate it: "Sometimes I think I shall die from being different even as I cling to the difference fiercely."

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