In 1974, when Rand was in the hospital, heavily medicated after the removal of one of her cancer-ridden lungs*, she asked her close friend Joan Blumenthal how the tree outside her window could be nine stories tall. Joan looked and realized that the morphine-addled Ayn Rand was really looking at a reflection of her IV pole in the window. Joan told her this, and Rand threw a giant fit, insisting that the “evidence of her senses” was infallible. She was pissed off for months that Joan tried to “undermine her rationality.”

*Bonus fact: Even after she lost a lung and quit smoking, she firmly denied that there was “any conclusive, nonstatistical” proof that smoking caused cancer.