"Aesthetic choice is a highly individual matter, and aesthetic experience is always a private one. Every new aesthetic reality makes one's experience even more private; and this kind of privacy, assuming at times the guise of literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to be, if not as guarantee, then a form of defense against enslavement. For a man with taste, particularly literary taste, is less susceptible to the refrains and the rhythmical incantations peculiar to any version of political demagogy. The point is not so much that virtue does not constitute a guarantee for producing a masterpiece, as that evil, especially political evil, is always a bad stylist. The more substantial an individual's aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer - though not necessarily the happier - he is."

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1987
Joseph Brodsky

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1987/brodsky-lecture.html

Ayn Rand: Why is she so popular?

"She's become a more dominant influence than she's ever been and that's bad because she's made it cool to be selfish. It's bad for the people outside her favoured elite, the 99%. And it's bad for the morality of the US," says Gary Weiss, author of Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America's Soul.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19280545