If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose--because it contains all the others--the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out."

The above is an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, © Copyright, 1957, by Ayn Rand

Read the full article here:

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1826

Whenever you committed the evil of refusing to think and to see, of exempting from the absolute of reality some small wish of yours, whenever you chose to say:  Let me withdraw from the judgement of reason the cookies I stole, or the existence of God, let me have my one irrational whim and I will be a man of reason about all else - that was the act of subverting your consciousness, the act of corrupting your mind.  Your mind then became a fixed jury who takes orders from a secret underworld, whose verdict distorts the evidence to fit an absolute it dares not touch - and a censored reality is the result, a splintered reality where bits you choose to see are floating among the chasms of those you didn't, held together by that embalming fluid of the mind which is an emotion exempted from thought.

As a basic step of self-esteem, learn to treat as the mark of a cannibal any man's demand for your help.  To demand it is to claim that your life is his property --- and loathsome as such claim might be, there's something still more loathesome: your agreement.  Do you ask if it's ever proper to help another man?  No - if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him.  Yes - if such is your own desire based on you own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle.  Suffering as such is not a value; only man's fight against suffering, is.  If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the grounds of his virtue, of his fight to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help.  But to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim - is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values.  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 small smile he has not earned,a tribute to a zero is treason to life and to all those who struggle to maintain it.  It is of such pennies and smiles that the desolation of your world was made.

" My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

"No.  I don't like people who speak or think in terms of gaining anybody's confidence.  If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others, only their rational perception.  The person who craves a moral blank check of that kind, has dishonest intentions, whether he admits it to himself or not."

Then no rightful cause was left, and the pain of anger was turning into the shameful pain of submission.  He had no right to condemn anyone - he thought - to denounce anything, to fight and die joyously, claiming the sanctity of virtue.  The broken promises, the unconfessed desires, the betrayal, the deceit, the lies, the fraud - he was guilty of them all.  What form of corruption could he scorn?  Degrees do not matter, he thought; one does not bargain about inches of evil.

Miss Taggart, do you know the hallmark of the second - rater?  It's resentment of another man's achievement.  Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own -- they have no inkling of the lonliness that comes when you reach the top.  The lonliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire.  They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking you take pleasure in letting your brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of your life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them.  They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors.  They don't know that that dream is infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of achievement would not be able to bear.  They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred?  No, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom.  Of what account are praise and adulation from men whom you don't respect?  Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire?  For something, not to look down at, but up to?

I think it's funny.  There was a time when men were afraid that somebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to their fellows.  Nowadays, they're afraid that somebody will name what everybody knows.  Have you practical people ever thought that that's all it would take to blast your whole, big, complex structure, with all your laws and guns --- just somebody naming the exact nature of what you're doing?

Hank, I want nothing from you except what you wish to give me.  Do you remember that you called me a trader once?  I want you to come to me seeking nothing but your own enjoyment.  So long as you wish to remain married, whatever your reason, I have no right to resent it.  My way of trading is to know that the joy you give me is paid for by the joy you get from me - not by your suffering or mine.  I don't accept sacrifices and I don't make them.  If you asked me for more than you meant to me, I would refuse.  If you asked me to give up the railroad, I'd leave you.  If ever the pleasure of one has to be bought by the pain of the other, there better be no trade at all.  A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud.  You don't do it in business, Hank.  Don't do it in your own life.

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.