With the great quality of egoism, great deeds and great merits became extinct. - Oscar Levy

Whose interest was it to protect the weak? It was the weak themselves, the slave and the woman. And was not this verdict in conformity with historical fact ? Who were the first Christians? Slaves and women. Who next swore that it was incumbent on men to love their neighbour as themselves, to break their bread with the hungry, to give them their cloak and their possessions? They who had nor bread nor cloaks, nor possessions, they who might win by the bargain.

“Oh ! the years I have lost,” will be the exclamation of a man, if he be not philosophical, and not possess Friedrich Nietzsche’s appreciation of the value of sorrow in education.

It had become an indisputable dogma that every expression in the same language must bear the same meaning in all peoples. And this was really the greatest affliction of the Select of that epoch, that they had to converse in the same tongue as the rabble, which had so often been desecrated in Parliaments, and assemblies, and lectures, and railway carriages; all of them, like Stendhal, would have given a great deal to have a langue sacre, comprehensible only by the few. All of them, like Goethe, allegorized meanings into their best works, in order to give the slip to prying snouts, and endeavoured to make themselves, as did Nietzsche, inaccessible, in order that “the swine might not break into the gardens.”