Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man.

The line argues that a person’s capacity for moral and spiritual greatness depends on the ability to feel reverence—understood not as submissive worship, but as an earned admiration for the highest human virtues and achievements. If a culture trains people to sneer at excellence, treat ideals as naïve, or reduce great individuals to mere products of circumstance, it erodes the inner aspiration that makes heroism possible. In Rand’s value system, “the hero” is the individual who chooses principled action, integrity, and creative ambition; reverence for the best in humanity functions as a psychological fuel for such striving. The quote thus defends admiration as a necessary condition for human elevation.