“Men have been taught that the highest virtue is not to achieve, but to give.  Yet one cannot give that which has not been created.  Creation comes before distribution—or there will be nothing to distribute.  The need of the creator comes before the need of any possible beneficiary.  Yet we are taught to admire the second-hander who dispenses gifts he has not produced above the man who made the gifts possible.  We praise an act of charity.  We shrug at an act of achievement.”  -Ayn Rand

War destroys.  But peace does not build.

“This type of reasoning would mean that a ‘big’ genius, like Edison, and a ‘big’ gangster, like Stalin, were equal malefactors:  one flooded the world with immeasurable values and the other with incalculable slaughter, but both did it on a very big scale.  I doubt whether anyone would care to equate these two—yet this is the precise difference between big business and big government.”  Ayn Rand