In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.My reading was once limited to more popular, contemporary authors like Mary Higgins-Clark, Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, and Nora Roberts. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.

Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. “The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else.” They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem.

It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value.

No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. “Love is blind, they say sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers.

Atlas shrugged author