A great book that makes one think great thoughts.

"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."