Saturday Afternoon Cigar

A Rocky Patel Sun Grown was Sun Burned this afternoon...

We are still reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. NEVER have we read a book that better captures our frustrations with the envy crowd of America's liberals progressives communists. We're glad this is a 1000-page book because we don't want it to end. Below are some great lines from this week's readings:

P. 412 - Is money the root of evil?

Let me give you a clue to men's character: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on Earth and need means to deal with one another - their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

P. 414 - The difference of America:

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.

P. 533 - From the looters' perspective as to the economic crisis and their instinct to control industry from DC:

But it is their own fault. It's their lack of social spirit. They [those who produce] refuse to recognize that production is not a private choice, but a public duty. They have no right to fail, no matter what conditions happen to come up. They've got to go on producing. It's a social imperative. A man's work is not a personal matter, it's a social matter. There's no such thing as a personal matter - or a personal life. That's what we've got to force them to learn.