All I mean is that a board of directors is one or two ambitious men--and a lot of ballast. I mean that groups of men are vacuums. Great big empty nothings. They say we can't visualize a total nothing. Hell, sit at any committee meeting. The point is only who chooses to fill that nothing. It's a tough battle. The toughest. It's simple enough to fight any enemy, so long as he's there to be fought. But when he isn't. . .

In 1941 Paramount Pictures produced a movie version of the play. The novel centers on an uncompromising young architect named Howard Roark and his struggle against what Rand described as "second-handers"—those who attempt to live through others placing others above self. Afterward Ayn Rand turned to nonfiction to promote her philosophy publishing her own magazines and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982.

Ayn Rand (pron. In politics Ayn Rand condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed collectivism and statism as well as anarchism instead supporting a minarchist limited government and laissez-faire capitalism which Ayn Rand believed was the only social system that protected individual rights.