"Existence is not a negation of negatives. Evil, not value, is an absence and a negation, evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us. ... a zero cannot hold a mortgage over life.
1/
1/
"You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is not death we wish to avoid, but life we wish to live.
2/
2/
"You, who have lost the concept of the difference, you who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal power - and secretly add that fear is more 'practical' - you do not wish to live, and only fear of death holds you to the existence you have damned.
3/
3/
"You dart in panic through the trap of your days, looking for the exit you have closed, running from a pursuer you dare not name to a terror you dare not acknowledge, and the greater your terror the greater your dread of the only act that could save you: thinking.
4/
4/
"The purpose of your struggle is not to know, not to grasp or name or hear the thing I shall now state to your hearing: that yours is the Morality of Death.
5/
5/
"Death is the standard of your values, death is your chosen goal, and you have to keep running, since there is no escape from the pursuer who is out to destroy you or from the knowledge that the pursuer is yourself. Stop running for once - there is no place to run -
6/
6/
"stand naked, as you dread to stand, but as I see you, and take a look at what you dared to call a moral code. Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil,
7/
7/
"then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity, without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil,
8/
8/
"which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not. It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design
9/
9/
or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him - it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts,
10/
10/
"his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man. The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin."
~ Galt's Speech, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
~ Galt's Speech, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand
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