Atlas Shrugged

by Ayn Rand

“When everybody agrees,” Taggart’s voice suddenly went shrill, “when people are unanimous, how does one man dare to dissent? By what right? That’s what I want to know—by what right?”

“I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind—and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”

The letters said: “. . . in a momentous drama giving the answer to the great problem: Should a woman tell?”