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The intellectuals serve as guides, as trend-setters, as the transmission belts or middlemen between philosophy and the culture. If they adopt a philosophy of reason - if their goal is the development of man's rational faculty and the pursuit of knowledge - they are a society's most productive and most powerful group, because their work provides the base and the integration of all other human activities. If the intellectuals are dominated by a philosophy of irrationalism, they become a society's unemployed and unemployable.
- -- Ayn Rand, "A Preview," The Ayn Rand Letter, I, 24
