Parasites

This book is awesome. Puts all of the unspoken beliefs I've ever had about how I live my life into words and has kept me motivated during some low times. The following excerpt contains part of a conversation between 2 men, one of which is the inventor of the world's strongest metal, which he uses to create railways, and hugely changes the country's ability to transport people and supplies...

It's a great example of why you should live for yourself and expect everyone else to carry their own damn weight....

Excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand:

........"Did you want to see it used by whining rotters who never rouse themselves to any effort, who do not possess the ability of a filing clerk, but demand the income of a company president, who drift from failure to failure and expect you to pay their bills, who hold their wishing as an equivalent of your work and their need as a higher claim to reward than your effort, who demand that you serve them, who demand that it be the aim of your life to serve them, who demand that your strength be the voiceless, rightless, unpaid, unrewarded slave of their impotence, who proclaim that you are born to serfdom by reason of your genius, while they are born to rule by the grace of incompetence, that yours is only to give, but theirs only to take, that yours is to produce, but theirs to consume, that you are not to be paid, neither in matter nor in spirit, neither by wealth nor by recognition nor by respect nor by gratitude.....so that they would ride on your rail and sneer at you and curse you, since they owe you nothing, not even the effort of taking off their hats which you paid for? Would this be what you wanted? Would you feel proud of it?

You take pride in setting no limit to your endurance because you think that you are doing right. What if you aren't? What if you're placing your virtue in the service of evil and letting it become a tool for the destruction of everything you love, respect, and admire? Why don't you uphold your own code of morals among men as you do among iron smelters? You who won't allow one percent of impurity into an alloy of metal........what have you allowed into your moral code?

You who would not submit to the hardships of nature, but set out to conquer it and placed it in the service of your joy and your comfort.....to what have you submitted at the hands of men? You who know from your work that one bears punishment only for being wrong....what have you been willing to bear and for what reason?

All your life, you have been denounced, not for your faults, but for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not for your mistakes, but for your achievements. You have been scorned for all those qualities of character which are your highest pride. You have been called selfish for the courage of acting on your own judgment and bearing sole responsibility for your own life. You have been called arrogant for your independent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding integrity. You have been called antisocial for the vision that made you venture upon undiscovered roads. You have been called ruthless for the strength and self-discipline of your drive to your purpose. You have been called greedy for the magnificence of your power to create wealth. You, who've expanded an inconceivable flow of energy, have been called a parasite.

You knew that man needs the strictest code of values to deal with nature, but you thought that you needed no such code to deal with men. You left the deadliest weapon in the hands of your enemies...a weapon you never suspected or understood. Their moral code is their weapon. Ask yourself how deeply and in how many terrible ways you have accepted it. Ask yourself what it is that a code of moral values does to a man's life and why he can't exist without it and what happens to him if he accepts the wrong standard, by which the evil is the good.

You're guilty of a great sin, much guiltier than they tell you, but not in the way they preach. The worst guilt is to accept an undeserved guilt...and that is what you have been doing all your life. You have been paying blackmail, not for your vices, but for your virtues. But your virtues were those that keep men alive.Your own moral code...the one you lived by but never stated, acknowledged or defended....was the code that preserves man's existence. If you were punished for it, what was the nature of those who punished you? Yours was the code of life. What, then, is theirs? What standard of values lies at its root? What is its ultimate purpose?"