THS have which has to be posted by the webmaster. Any reason not to have a thread to the same effect (hope there isn't one already and I missed it...)?

During the Summer of Love I was 15. I soaked up all the tune in, turn on, everything is cool, man, big business is uncool, man, soon we'll all have endless leisure --- and so on. You know the deal. Left wing socialism was so perfectly true as to be unquestionable.

The work of Ayn Rand took all this ragbag of nothing, pulled it out of my head, and made it pavement pizza. But I never quite 100% bought her alternative . Could never articulate any reason clearly, never put my thumb on it, even though I spent much time on it. Then on rereading my RAH (too thick to see all the messages on first pass) he had a character say "Would you steal to feed a baby?". 7 words to blow the whole Rand schmeer out of the water.

But RAH did better than that, much better. Almost all mainstream literature deals with love, relationships, sex, the same themes over and over; "What is love?" for instance. You already know, RAH fan, the answer: love is that state of mind where the happiness of someone else is essential to your own. Question answered, move on. It really did feel like a light turning on in my head. And, IIRC, that sentence did not appear in the full version of SIASL, only in the original, edited version; edited by RAH himself, of course.

He changed my view of the world, fundamentally. Twice. No-one else has done that.