Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have
no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by
fraud—that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an
act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become
a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions,
while their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness become the
enemies you have to dread and flee—that you do not care to live as a
dependent, least of all a dependent on the stupidity of others, or as a fool
whose source of values is the fools he succeeds in fooling—that honesty is not
a social duty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most profoundly
selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to sacrifice the reality of his
own existence to the deluded consciousness of others.