One big reason why men do not develop greater abilities, greater sales strength, greater resourcefulness is because they use neither their abilities nor their opportunities. We don't need more strength or more ability or greater opportunity. What we need is to use what we have. Men fail and their families suffer deprivations when all the time these men have in their possession the same assets other men are utilizing to accumulate a fortune. . . . Life doesn't cheat. It doesn't pay in counterfeit coin. It doesn't lock up shop and go home when pay-day comes. It pays every man exactly what he has earned. The age-old law that a man gets what he earns hasn't been suspended. When we take that truth home and believe it, we've turned a big corner on the high road that runs straight through to success.
A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest - but if devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.
God help us, ma'am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we'd been given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it - for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man's dishonesty. The honest ones paid, the dishonest collected. The honest lost, the dishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort of a law of goodness?
OCCIDENT, n. The world lying west (or east) of the Orient. Largely inhabited by Christians, powerful sub-tribe of the Hypocrites, whose principal industries are murder and cheating, which they are pleased to call "war" and "commerce."