""Observe the persistence, in mankind's mythologies, of the legend about a paradise that men had once possessed, the city of Atlantis or the Garden of Eden or some kingdom of perfection, always behind us. The root of the legend exists, not in the past of the race, but in the past of every man. You still retain a sense - not as firm as a memory, but diffused like the pain of hopeless longing - that somewhere in the starting years of your childhood, before you had learned to submit, to absorb the terror of unreason and to doubt the value of your mind, you had known a radiant state of existence, you had known the independence of a rational consciousness facing an open universe. That is the paradise which you have lost, which you seek - which is yours for the taking."
- Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, pg 1057