Portion of John Galt's Speech, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
"We will open our gates to our city to those who deserve to enter.
With the sign as the dollar as our symbol - the sign of free trade and free minds - we will move to reclaim this country once more from the impotent savages who never discovered its nature, its meaning, its splendor.
Those who choose to join us, will join us; those who don't, will not have the power to stop us; hordes of savages have never been an obstacle to men who carried the banner of the mind.
In that world, you'll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you have known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe. You will live in a world of responsible beings, who will be consistent and reliable as facts; the guarantee of their character will be a system of existence where objective reality is the standard of the judge.
Every chance will be open to your good, none will be provided for your evil. What you'll receive from men will not be alms, or pity, or mercy, or forgiveness of sins, but a single value: justice.
And when you'll look at men or at yourself, you will feel, not disgust, suspicion and guilt, but a single constant: respect.
In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those what are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads.
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of the battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.
But to win it requires your total dedication and a total break with the world of your past, with the doctrine that man is a sacrificial animal who exists for the pleasure of others. Fight for the value of your person. Fight for the virtue of your pride. Fight for the essence of that which is man: for his sovereign rational mind. Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.
You will win when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle - and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world:
"I swear - by my life and my love of it - that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.""
~ John Galt's Speech, Altas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
