We’d quote the big Gary Cooper courtroom speech, transferred form the book verbatim,  as a Money Quote but someone else has already posted it here, as a life lesson, with which we would heartily agree. I’ll just pluck out some good parts :

  “The ‘common good’ of a collective—a race, a class, a state—was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men. Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. Has any act of selfishness ever equaled the carnage perpetrated by disciples of altruism?

***

 “The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is—Hands off!
     “Now observe the results of a society built on the principle of individualism. This, our country. The noblest country in the history of men. The country of greatest achievement, greatest prosperity, greatest freedom. This country was not based on selfless service, sacrifice, renunciation or any precept of altruism. It was based on a man’s right to the pursuit of happiness. His own happiness. Not anyone else’s. A private, personal, selfish motive. Look at he results. Look into your own conscience.”

***

     ”I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.
     “I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.
     “It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.”

The pilot of this plane was the indiividual with his hand on the controls and the throttle. He decided the pitch of the nose and where in the river to steer to. There was nothing collective about the saving of these lives. And yet they were saved. Would they have been of the choices he made were made buy a committee?

It is people like thi spilot to whom the writer referred with the speech spoken by Gary Cooper’s Howard Roark. And he has a name right out of one of Rand’s books, Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger.