"Where does one not encounter that veiled glance which burdens one with a profound sadness, that inward-turned glance of the born failure which betrays how such a man speaks to himself – that glance which is a sigh! ‘If only I were someone else,’ sighs this glance: ‘but there is no hope of that. I am who I am: how could I ever get free of myself? And yet – I am sick of myself!’

It is on such soil, on swampy ground, that every weed, every poisonous plant grows, always so small, so hidden, so false, so saccharine. Here the worms of vengefulness and rancor swarm; here the air stinks of secrets and concealment; here the web of the most malicious of all conspiracies is being spun constantly – the conspiracy of the suffering against the well-constituted and victorious, here the aspect of the victorious is hated. And what mendaciousness is employed to disguise that this hatred is hatred! What a display of grand words and postures, what an art of ‘honest’ calumny!

These failures: what noble eloquence flows from their lips! How much sugary, slimy, humble submissiveness swims in their eyes! What do they really want? At least to represent justice, love, wisdom, superiority – that is the ambition of the ‘lowest,’ the sick. And how skillful such an ambition makes them! Admire above all the forger’s skill with which the stamp of virtue, even the ring, the golden-sounding ring of virtue, is here counterfeited. They monopolize virtue, these weak, hopelessly sick people, there is no doubt of it: ‘we alone are the good and just,’ they say, ‘we alone are homines bonae voluntatis.’

They walk among us as embodied reproaches, as warnings to us – as if health, well-constitutedness, strength, pride and sense of power were in themselves necessarily vicious things for which one must pay some day, and pay bitterly: how ready they themselves are at bottom to make one pay; how they crave to be hangmen."

Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, c.1887