A Quote from "Atlas Shrugged"

I've been working my way through Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, for nearly the last year. I made the decision to read it back in March of 2009, after attending a Tea Party in my hometown. I had been hearing people make reference to the book for some time before that, but the Tea Party clinched it. It has taken so long because the content is so pithy that I have to pace myself to be able to absorb it all. And let's be honest, also because cross-referencing the events in the book with current events in real life has proved scary--so much so that I can only take small amounts at a time. But I'm within 90 or so pages of finishing it now, and hope to make it by the one-year mark (there are 1084 pages total in the book). So here's a quote from the book's most famous character:

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means:  to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defence, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force. The only proper functions of a government are:  the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law. But a government that initiates the employment of force against men who had forced no one, the employment of armed compulsion against disarmed victims, is a nightmare infernal machine designed to annihilate morality; such a government reverses its only moral purpose and switches from the role of protector to the role of man's deadliest enemy, from the role of policeman to the role of a criminal vested with the right to the wielding of violence against victims deprived of the right of self-defense. Such a government substitutes for morality the following rule of social conduct: you may do whatever you please to your neighbor, provided your gang is bigger than his.     ~John Galt