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.