"Stand on an empty stretch of soil in a wilderness unexplored by men and ask yourself what manner of survival you would achieve and how long you would last if you refused to think, with no one around to teach you the motions, or, if you chose to think, how much your mind would be able to discover - ask yourself how many independent conclusions you have reached in the course of your life and how much of your time was spent on performing the actions you learned from others - ask yourself whether you would be able to discover how to till the soil and grow your food, whether you would be able to invent a wheel, a lever, an induction coil, a generator, an electronic tube - then decide whether men of ability are exploiters who live by the fruit of your labor and rob you of the wealth that you produce, and whether you dare to believe that you posses the power to enslave them."
But you, you grotesque little atavists, stare blindly at the skyscrapers and smokestacks around you and dream of enslaving the material providers who are scientists, inventors, industrialists. When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind. I have taught my strikers that the answer you deserve is only: 'Try and get it.'
This idol of your cult zero-worship, this symbol of impotence - the congenital dependent - is your image of man and your standard of value, in whose likeness you strive to refashion your soul. It's only human you cry in defense of any depravity, reaching the stage of self-abasement where you seek to make the concept human mean the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud, and to exile from the human race the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong the purposeful, the pure - as if to feel were human, but to think were not, as if to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but virtue were not - as if the premise of death were proper to man, but the premise of life were not."
- By Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt Speaking 915
