"When you accept money in payment for your
effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the
product of the effort of others. Not an
ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your
wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Your wallet is your statement of hope that
somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that
moral principle which is the root of money."
"Try to obtain your food my by means of nothing
but physical motions - and you'll learn
that man's mind is the root of all the goods and services produced and of all
the wealth that has ever existed on earth."
"To trade by means of money is the code of the
men of good will. Money rests on the
axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value
of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade
you his effort in return. Money permits
no deals except those who mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the
individuals involved. Money demands you
recognize that men are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your
misery - that you must offer them values, not wounds, that the common bond among men is not the exchange
of suffering, but the exchange of goods and services. Money demands that you sell, not your
weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason. It demands that you buy, not the shoddiest
they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade - with reason, not
force as their final arbiter - it is the best product that wins, the best performance,
the man of best judgment and highest ability - and the degree of a man's
productiveness is the degree of his reward."
Money will not purchase happiness for the man who
has no concept of what he wants. Money
will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or
respect for the incompetent. The man who
attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money
replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the
cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn the law which he has not
discovered: That no man may be smaller
than his money."
"Be it a highwayman who confronts a traveler
with the ultimatum: "Your money or your life," or a politician who
confronts a country with the ultimatum: "Your children's education or your
life," the meaning of that ultimatum is: "Your mind or your
life" - and neither is possible to man without the other. I do not enter discussions with neighbors who
think they can forbid me to think. I do
not place my moral sanction upon a murderer's wish to kill me. When a man attempts to deal with me by force,
I answer him - by force. It is only as
retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his
concept of morality: I merely grant him
his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right o choose: his own.
A holdup man seeks to gain wealth by killing me, I do not grow richer by
killing a holdup man. I seek no values by
means of evil, nor do I surrender my values to evil"
"If you wish to save the last of your dignity,
do not call your best actions a 'sacrifice': that term brands you as
immoral. If a mother buys food for her
hungry child rather than a hat for herself, it is NOT a sacrifice: she values the child higher than the hat; but
it is a sacrifice to the kind of mother whose higher value is the hat, who
would prefer her child to starve and feeds him only from a sense of duty. If a man dies fighting for his own freedom,
it is NOT a sacrifice: he is not willing
to live as a slave; but it IS a sacrifice to the kind of man who is willing. If a man refuses to sell his convictions, it
is NOT a sacrifice, unless he is the sort of man who has no convictions."
"Sacrifice could be proper only for those who
have nothing to sacrifice - no values, no standards, no judgment - those whose
desires are irrational whims, blindly conceived and lightly surrendered. For a man of moral stature, whose desires are
born of rational values, sacrifice is the surrender of the right to the wrong,
of the good to the evil."
"Do you wonder why you live without dignity,
love without fire and die without resistance?
Do you wonder why, wherever you look, you see nothing but unanswerable
questions, why your life is torn by impossible conflicts, why you spend it
straddling irrational fences to evade artificial choices, such as soul or body,
mind or heart, security or freedom, private profit or public good? Do you cry that you find no answers? By what means did you hope to find them? You reject your tool of perception - your
mind - then complain that the universe is a mystery. You discard your key, then wail that all
doors are locked against you. You start
out in pursuit of the irrationals, then damn existence for making no
sense."
"The fence you have been straddling is the
coward's formula contained in the sentence": "But we don't have to go
to extremes!" The extreme you have
always struggled to avoid is the recognition that reality is final that A is A
and that the truth is true. A moral code
impossible to dissolve all ideas in fog, to permit no firm definitions, to
regard any concept as approximate and any rule of conduct as elastic, to hedge
on any principle, to compromise on any value, to take the middle of any
road. By making moral judgments
impossible, it has made you incapable of rational judgment."
"The man who refuses to judge, who neither
agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes
that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that
is now spilled in the world. Reality is
an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust in an absolute and so is
a human life. Whether you live or die is
an absolute. Either you have a piece of
bread or not, is an absolute. Whether
you eat your bread or see it vanish in a tax collector's stomach is an
absolute."
"There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but
the middle is always evil. The man who
is wrong still retains some respect for the truth, if only by accepting the
responsibility of choice. But the man in
the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no
choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle,
willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the
guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to
jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each
other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can
win. In any compromise between good and
evil, it is only evil that can profit.
In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil the
compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube."
"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 - an you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining,
traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil. When they yell that it is selfish to be
certain that you are right, you hasten to assure them that you're certain of
nothing. When they shout that it's
immoral to stand on your convictions, you assure them that you have no
convictions whatever. When the thugs of
the State snarl that you are guilty of intolerance, because you don't treat your
desire to live and their desire to kill you as a difference of opinion - you
cringe and hasten to assure them that you are not intolerant of any
horror. When some barefoot bum in some pesthole
yells at you: How dare you be rich - you apologize and beg him to be patient
and promise him you'll give it all away."
You have then reached the blind alley of the treason you committed when
you agreed that you had no right to exist.
Once you believed it was 'only a compromise' you conceded it was evil to
live for yourself, but moral to live for the sake of your children. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live
for your children, but moral to live for your community. Then you conceded that it was selfish to live
for your community, but moral to live for your country. Now you are letting this greatest of
countries be devoured by any scum from any corner of the earth, while you
concede that it is selfish to live for your country and that your moral duty is
to live for the globe. A man who has no
right to life, has no right to values and will not keep them."
