It may help to remember here that Ayn Rand wrote that stuff as an ex-citizen of a country with a communist regime that employed exactly those tactics against their citizens, I highly doubt that she intended or foresaw those words to be used against the rulers of the country that she chose to live in.
But then, she also wrote Atlas Shrugged as a kind of warning, with the hope that we would not become the kind of regime she fled. The OP is exactly apropos.
The context you've mentioned is important. I'm not a fan of Rand's overall philosophy (sympathetic to parts of it, perhaps, but that's not terribly important), but surely one can appreciate this quote in the appropriate context, even if they reject the greater body of her work.
