"And how do the Whole Earth heirs of Silicon Valley stand today compared to their financially bereft Epiphonatorian counterparts? Apple couldn’t get much bigger without selling oil, while the media industry has been reduced to dime-size buttons that show up on iPhone screens. Google regularly announces initiatives to “save” the newspaper and book industries — like a modern-day hunter who proclaims himself a conservationist. And Facebook, having already swallowed up enormous chunks of discretionary media consumption time, has its old-school media counterparts chasing after “Likes” as if they were cocaine being dispensed in a lab rat’s cage."

"…please do not be cynical…nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get, but if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you, amazing things will happen."

"The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves — in their separate, and individual capacities."

"Oh, and what I hear you saying, young man, is that those people who grow your food, harvest it in the fields (without even minimum wages) and transport it to the stores, those people who clean your streets and take away your garbage so you don’t have to live in filth, those people who will teach your children if you have any, and take care of your infants and toddlers while you do your productive business, those people who build the cars you drive in, who work overtime without pay at big box stores for $18,000 a year, whose backs turn to jelly after years of driving the trucks that carry your products to you, those people whose work benefits you every day of your life—those people who have seen almost zero improvement in their real wages during the past generation of policies favoring John Galt—those are the “unproductive” people whose survival only the Galts make possible. And meanwhile, those other people, the ones who have seen their incomes mushroom and their taxes wither, those “self-made” people with expensive educations whose brainpower and hard work have created such wonders as exploding derivates and credit default swaps, whose “products” never affect your daily life except when you have to bail out the disasters they create, those “best and brightest” people who earn more in a day than your child-care providers will earn in a year, whose year-end bonuses are often greater than the lifetime earnings of ordinary workers—they are the “productive” people."

"People are greedy, all are, including Mother Teresa, and as far as we know will be forever. So when one says a bunch of tripe about “greed”, it’s probably because they lack any legitimate understand of the incentive structures involved."