What men find in the spectacle of the ultimate triumph of the good is the inspiration to fight for one’s own values in the moral conflicts of one’s own life.

If the proclaimers of human impotence, the seekers of automatic security, protest that “life is not like that, happy endings are not guaranteed to man”—the answer is: a thriller is more realistic than such views of existence, it shows men the only road that can make any sort of happy ending possible.

- Ayn Rand. The Romantic Manifesto (1969).