[poconopundit]

"And because I read Atlas Shrugged."

* * *

Excellent commentary, HotHunt.  A year back I ran across Ayn Rand's Introduction to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition to the Fountainhead, and here's an excerpt:

The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man's highest potential and strive to actualize it.  The man-haters are those who regard man as a helpless, depraved, contemptible creature — and struggle never to let him discover otherwise. . . Perhaps the best way to communicate The Fountainhead's sense of life is by means of the quotation which had stood at the head of my manuscript, but which I removed from the final, published book. "The noble soul has a fundamental certainty about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost.  The noble soul has reverence for itself." Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil This view of man has rarely been expressed in human history.  Today, it is virtually non-existent.  Yet this is the view with which — in various degrees of longing, wistfulness, passion and agonized confusion — the best of mankind's youth start out in life. It is a sense of enormous expectation, the sense that one's life is important, that great achievements are within one's capacity, and that great things lie ahead. It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man's proper stature — and that the rest will betray it.  It is those few that move the world and give life its meaning. Ayn Rand, New York, May 1968

[HotHunt]

Thanks.

[DGravalloni]

I’ve been hearing a lot about that book. When I get ahold of a copy I want to read it.