"Honesty is the recognition of the fact
that the unreal is unreal and can have no value,
that neither love nor fame nor cash
is a value if obtained by fraud—
that an attempt to gain a value
by deceiving the mind of others
is an act of raising your victims
to a position higher than reality,
where you become a pawn of their blindness,
a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions,
while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness
become the enemies you have to dread and flee—
that you do not care to live as a dependent,
least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others,
or as a fool whose source of values
is the fools he succeeds in fooling—
that honesty is not a social duty,
not a sacrifice for the sake of others,
but the most profoundly selfish virtue man can practice:
his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his own existence
to the deluded consciousness of others."
~ Ayn Rand
