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Ryan's Speech

What is the greatest lie ever created? What is the most vicious obscenity ever perpetrated on mankind? Slavery? The Holocaust? Dictatorship? No! It is the tool with which all that wickedness is built: Altruism.

Whenever anyone wants others to do their work, they call upon their altruism. Never mind your own needs, they say. Think of the needs of, of … whoever: Of the State, of the poor, of the army, of the king, of God. The list goes on and on.

How many catastrophes were launched with the words Think of yourself? It's the king and country crowd that light the torch of destruction. It is this Great Inversion, this Ancient Lie, which has chained humanity to an endless cycle of guilt and failure.

My journey to Rapture was my second exodus.

In 1919 I fled a country that had traded in despotism for insanity. The Marxist Revolution had simply traded in one lie for another. Instead of one man, the Czar, owning the work of all of the people, all the people owned the work of all of the people. And so I came to America, where a man can own his own work, where a man can benefit from the brilliance of his own mind, the strength of his own muscles, the might of his own will.

I had thought that I had left the parasites of Moscow behind me. I had thought I had left the Marxist altruists to their collective farms and their five-year plans. But as the German fools threw themselves on Hitler's sword for the good of the Reich, the Americans drank deeper and deeper of the Bolshevist poison, spoon fed to them by Roosevelt and his New Dealers.

And so, I asked myself, In what country is there a place for men like me? Men who refuse to say 'yes' to the parasites and the doubters? Men who believe that work is sacred, that property rights are inviolate? And then the happy answer came to me, my friends: There was no country for people like me! And that was the moment I decided to build one.