"Do not pretend that a malevolent reality defeated you
- you were defeated by your own evasions.
Do not pretend that you will perish for a noble ideal
- you will perish as fodder for the haters of man."
~ By Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, "This is John Galt Speaking"
"You did not care to compete in terms of intelligence - you are now competing in terms of brutality. You did not care to allow rewards to be won by successful production - you are now running a race in which rewards are won by successful plunder. You called it selfish and cruel that men should trade value for value - you have now established a society where they trade extortion for extortion. - 976
Your system is a legal civil war, where men gang up on one another
and struggle for possession of the law, which they use as a club over rivals. - 976
You had said that you saw no difference between economic and political power, between the power of money and the power of guns - no difference between reward and punishment, no difference between purchase and plunder, no difference between pleasure and fear, no difference between life and death. You are learning the difference now. - 976
Suffering as such is not a value; only man's fight against suffering is. - 970
A man who has no virtues is a hater of existence who acts on the premise of death; to help him is to sanction his evil and to support his career of destruction. Be it only a penny you will not miss or a kindly smile he has not earned, a tribute to a zero is treason to life and to all those who struggle to maintain it. - 970-971
It is of such pennies and smiles that the desolation of your world was made. -971
You, who are half-rational, half-coward, have been playing a con game with reality, but the victim you have conned is yourself. When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it's picked up by scoundrels - and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil. - 966
