Proper and justly obtained Pride is a Virtue not a vice!

"Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value and, like all of man's values, it has to be earned -- that of any achievements open to you, the one that makes all others possible is the creation of your own character -- that your character, your actions, your desires, your emotions are the products of the premises held by your mind -- that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of the character that makes his life worth sustaining -- that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul -- that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has to automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral idea, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must make by choice -- that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself -- and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul's shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness, and then incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others." [Ayn Rand, For The New Intellectual, p 130]