“The only pride of her workday was not that it had been lived, but that it had been survived. It was wrong, she thought, it was viciously wrong that one should ever be forced to say that about any hour of one's life.”

Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist and philosopher of the 20th century. She is best known for her novels *The Fountainhead* and *Atlas Shrugged*, which explore themes of individualism, capitalism, and rational egoism. Her ideas significantly influenced libertarian and objectivist thought.