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Rand book sales are "going through the roof," said Yaron Brook, the president of the Ayn Rand Institute. According to Brook, "Atlas Shrugged," her most famous novel, has sold more copies in the first four months of 2009 than it did for all of 2008 -- and in 2008, it sold 200,000 copies. It's been in Amazon.com's top 50 for more than a month. Not bad for a 1,100-page doorstop of a book that came out in 1957, by an author who died in 1982.

"So many people see the parallels with actually what's going on, with the government taking over the banks, with the government kind of taking over the automobile industry, a president who fires the CEO of a major American corporation. These are the kind of things that come out of 'Atlas Shrugged,' " Brook said.

Even Hollywood is said to be interested, which is only fitting, since Rand was once a screenwriter. But developments have come in fits and starts. "Godfather" producer Albert S. Ruddy once wanted to make a film and talk of miniseries adaptations emerged in the '70s and '90s. In 2006, Angelina Jolie was said to have been signed to star as Rand's heroine, rail magnate Dagny Taggart, and names such as Russell Crowe and Brad Pitt have also been floated. However, as of early 2009, the status of the film remains unknown.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, 1957

“Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence."

"To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men."

"Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not be consent, but by compulsion - when you see than in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot."

"Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor."

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money - and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement."

During the 1950s and 1960s Alan Greenspan was a friend of author Ayn Rand and a proponent of her Objectivist philosophy, which among other things holds that reason, egoism and capitalism are the necessary cornerstones of a free and civilized society. He wrote articles for Objectivist newsletters, and contributed several essays for Rand's 1966 book Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal. In Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal, Greenspan wrote an essay strongly supporting the gold standard.