I want to be prepared to claim the greatest virtue of all - that I was a man who made money

But why should you care what people will say? All you have to do is please yourself.

Don't rely on our knowledge of what's best for your future. We do know, but it can't be best until you know it.

The truly and deliberately evil men are a very small minority; it is the appeaser who unleashes them on mankind; it is the appeaser's intellectual abdication that invites them to take over. When a culture's dominant trend is geared to irrationality, the thugs win over the appeasers. When intellectual leaders fail to foster the best in the mixed, unformed, vacillating character of people at large, the thugs are sure to bring out the worst. When the ablest men turn into cowards, the average men turn into brutes.

Then no rightful cause was left, and the pain of anger was turning into the shameful pain of submission. He had no right to condemn anyone - he thought - to denounce anything, to fight and die joyously, claiming the sanctity of virtue. The broken promises, the unconfessed desires, the betrayal, the deceit, the lies, the fraud - he was guilty of them all. What form of corruption could he scorn? Degrees do not matter, he thought; one does not bargain about inches of evil.

A rational man is guided by his thinking - by a process of Reason - not by his feelings and desires.

But Aristotle's philosophy was the intellect's Declaration of Independence.