"If he finds himself fearing, evading and negating the highest experience possible to man, a state of unclouded exaltation, he can know that he is profound trouble and that his only alternatives are: either to check his value-premises from scratch, from the start, from the repressed, forgotten, betrayed figure of his particular Buck Rogers, and painfully to reconstruct his broken chain of normative abstractions—or to become completely the kind of monster he is in those moments when, with an obsequious giggle, he tells some fat Babbitt that exaltation is impractical.

"Just as Romantic art is a man's first glimpse of a moral sense of life, so it is his last hold on it, his last lifeline.

"Romantic art is the fuel and spark plug of a man's soul; its task is to set a soul on fire and never let it go out. The task of providing that fire with a motor and a direction belongs to philosophy."

Ayn Rand