“Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours.” 

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you
ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist
unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material
shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and
give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by
tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by
the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
"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. It is not the moochers or
the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world
can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive
tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--
your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. 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, Is this what you consider evil?
"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator
and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try
to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it
for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and
you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that
has ever existed on earth.
"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength
do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's
capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of
those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools?
By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the
lazy? Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every
honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he
can't consume more than he has produced.'
"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 you to obtain for your goods and your labor
that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no
deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money
demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their
own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they 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. 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. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what
you consider evil?
"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you
as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not
provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the
law of causality--the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the
mind.
"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants:
money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value,
and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek.
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 by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his
money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?
"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his
own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if
not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or
did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you
would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed
among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back
the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root.
Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it
evil?
"Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your
livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have
damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's
vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your
ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers
you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of
joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an
achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil,
because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you
enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?
"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the
product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money
will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your
hatred of money?
"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to
know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the
creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort
of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest
in proclaiming his hatred of money--and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of
money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.
"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: 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.

"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men

who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to

their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize

for being rich--will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of

looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a

man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve

him of the guilt--and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard--the men who live by force,

yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money--the men

who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the

statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminalsby-right

and looters-by-law--men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims--

then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless

men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for

other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at

production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the

murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins

and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the

barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by

compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from

men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in

goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work,

and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see

corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that

your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns 

and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as halfproperty,

half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is

men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its

owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into

the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an

equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed

by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal

looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the

day when it bounces, marked, 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do

not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder

of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting

rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world? You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive

civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its lifeblood--money.

You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder

why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history,

money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but

whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers

bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money,

which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was

produced by the labor of slaves--slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by

somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by

force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all

the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the

sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as

slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers--as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of

money--and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a

country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's

mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only

fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of

wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being--the self-made man--the

American industrialist.

"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. 

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of

the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest

achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the

industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property

of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter

who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of

the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide-- as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own

destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then

men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--

there is no other--and your time is running out." 

AQUARIUS – Does It in the Water (January 20 to February 18)
Trustworthy. Attractive. Great kisser. One of a kind. Loves being in long-term relationships. Tries hard. Will take on any project. Proud of themselves in whatever they do. Messy and unorganized. Procrastinators. Great lovers, when they’re not sleeping. Extreme thinkers. Loves their pets usually more than their family. Can be VERY irritating to others when they try to explain or tell a story. Unpredictable. Will exceed your expectations. Not a fighter, but will knock your lights out. 2 years of bad luck if you do not share this post.

PISCES – The Partner for Life (February 19 to March 20)
Caring and kind. Smart. Likes to be the center of attention. Very organized. High appeal to opposite sex. Likes to have the last word. Good to find, but hard to keep. Passionate, wonderful lovers. Fun to be around. Too trusting at times and gets hurt easily. VERY caring. They always try to do the right thing and sometimes get the short end of the stick. They sometimes get used by others and get hurt because of their trusting. Extremely weird but in a good way. Good sense of humor!! Thoughtful. Loves to joke. Very popular. Silly, fun and sweet. Good friend to others but needs to be choosy on who they allow their friends to be. 5 years of bad luck if you do not share this post.

ARIES – The Aggressive (March 21 to April 19)
Outgoing. Lovable. Spontaneous. Not one to mess with. Funny… Excellent kisser. EXTREMELY adorable. Loves relationships, and family is very important to an Aries. Aries are known for being generous and giving. Addictive. Loud. Always has the need to be ‘Right’. Aries will argue to prove their point for hours and hours. Aries are some of the most wonderful people in the world. 16 years of bad luck if you do not share this post.

TAURUS – The Tramp (April 20 to May 20)
Aggressive. Loves being in long relationships. Likes to give a good fight. Fight for what they want. Can be annoying at times, but for the love of attention. Extremely outgoing. Loves to help people in times of need. Good kisser. Good personality. Stubborn. A caring person. They can be self-centered and if they want something they will do anything to get it. They love to sleep and can be lazy. One of a kind. Not one to mess with. Are the most attractive people on earth! 15 years of bad luck if you do not share this post.

GEMINI – The Twin (May 21 to June 20)
Nice. Love is one of a kind. Great listeners. Very good at confusing people. Lover not a fighter, but will still knock you out. Geminis will not take any crap from anyone. Geminis like to tell people what they should do and get offended easily. They are great at losing things and are forgetful. Geminis can be very sarcastic and childish at times and are very nosy. Trustworthy. Always happy. VERY Loud. Talkative. Outgoing. VERY FORGIVING. Loves to make out. Has a beautiful smile. Generous. Strong. THE MOST IRRESISTIBLE. 9 years of bad luck if you do not share this post.

CANCER – The Beauty (June 21 to July 22)
MOST AMAZING KISSER. Very high appeal. A Cancer’s love is one of a kind… Very romantic. Most caring person you will ever meet in your life. Entirely creative person, most are artists and insane, respectfully speaking. They perfected sex and do it often. Extremely random. An ultimate freak. Extremely funny and is usually the life of the party. Most Cancers will take you under their wing and into their hearts where you will remain forever. Cancers make love with a passion beyond compare. Spontaneous. Not a fighter, but will kick your ass good if it comes down to it. Someone you should hold on to! 12 years of bad luck if you do not share this post.

LEO – The Lion (July 23 to August 22)
Great talker. Attractive and passionate. Laid back. Usually happy but when unhappy tend to be grouchy and childish. A Leo’s problem becomes everyone’s problem. Most Leos are very predictable and tend to be monotonous. Knows how to have fun. Is really good at almost anything. Great kisser. Very predictable. Outgoing. Down to earth. Addictive. Attractive. Loud. Loves being in long relationships. Talkative. Not one to mess with. Rare to find. Good when found. 7 years of bad luck if you do not share this post.

VIRGO – The One that Waits (August 23 to September 22)
Dominant in relationships. Someone loves them right now. Always wants the last word. Caring. Smart. Loud. Loyal. Easy to talk to. Everything you ever wanted. Easy to please. A pushover. Loves to gamble and take chances. Needs to have the last say in everything. They think they know everything and usually do. Respectful to others but you will quickly lose their respect if you do something untrustworthy towards them and never regain respect. They do not forgive and never forget. The one and only. 7 years of bad luck if you do not share this post.

LIBRA – The Lame One (September 23 to October 22)
Nice to everyone they meet. Their love is one of a kind. Silly, funny and sweet. Have own unique appeal. Most caring person you will ever meet! However, not the kind of person you want to mess with… you might end up crying. Libras can cause as much havoc as they can prevent. Faithful friends to the end. Can hold a grudge for years. Libras are someone you want on your side. Usually great at sports and are extreme sports fanatics. Very creative. A hopeless romantic. 9 years of bad luck if you do not share this post.

SCORPIO – The Addict (October 23 to November 21)
EXTREMELY adorable. Loves to joke. Very good sense of humor. Will try almost anything once. Loves to be pampered. Energetic. Predictable. GREAT kisser. Always get what they want. Attractive. Loves being in long relationships. Talkative. Loves to party but at times to the extreme. Loves the smell and feel of money and is good at making it but just as good at spending it! Very protective over loved ones. HARD workers. Can be a good friend but if is disrespected by a friend, the friendship will end. Romantic. Caring. 4 years of bad Luck if you do not share this post.

SAGITTARIUS – The Promiscuous One (November 22 to December 21)
Spontaneous. High appeal. Rare to find. Great when found. Loves being in long relationships. So much love to give. A loner most of the time. Loses patience easily and will not take crap. If in a bad mood stay FAR away. Gets offended easily and remembers the offense forever. Loves deeply but at times will not show it, feels it is a sign of weakness. Has many fears but will not show it. VERY private person. Defends loved ones with all their abilities. Can be childish often. Not one to mess with. Very pretty. Very romantic. Nice to everyone they meet. Their Love is one of a kind. Silly, fun and sweet. Have own unique appeal. Most caring person you will ever meet! Amazing in bed!!! Not the kind of person you want to mess with- you might end up crying. 4 years of bad luck if you do not share this post.

CAPRICORN – The Passionate Lover (December 22 to January 19)
Love to bust. Nice. Sassy. Intelligent. Sexy. Grouchy at times and annoying to some. Lazy and love to take it easy, but when they find a job or something they like to do they put their all into it. Proud, understanding and sweet. Irresistible. Loves being in long relationships. Great talker. Always gets what he or she wants. Cool. Loves to win against other signs in sports, especially Gemini’s. Likes to cook but would rather go out
To eat at good restaurants. Extremely fun. Loves to joke. Smart. 24 years of bad luck if you do not share this post.