Ayn Rand Speech Apollo and Dionysus, New York 1969
The link below is to text and audio from a famous speech by Ayn Rand in 1969 titled Apollo & Dionysus. In this speech, she contrasts two separate social paths of the late 1960s. On towards social decay and the other towards rigorous intellectual discipline, scientific value, and moral standards.
Hated for decades by liberals, Communists, Socialists and general anti-intellectual populists, Ms. Rand remains one of the greatest and most influential philosophers in history. She immigrated to the United States from Communist Russia in 1926 and became a prolific writer, speaker, playwright and political activist.
She first achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. Rand published Atlas Shrugged in 1957, which became her best-known work and today remains one of the best selling books of all time. Multiple surveys have found Atlas Shrug to be the second most influential book of all time, second to only the bible.
That is such a good speech (and later an essay in one of her non-fiction books)!