Far from settling his interests on a single, fixed and final object, the nihilistic egoist preserves himself in a constant state of flux and dissolut… - R. W. K. Paterson

It is not difficult for a man to make a series of true statements, all unimpeachably correct, and yet to be hopelessly wrong. This is not just because there are nearly always many other facts, which he has not chosen to state, which would fill out and could utterly transform the description of reality he is trying to foist upon us. If our perceptions of reality depend on facts, they also depend on our values, for these determine not only how we see the facts but also which facts we shall see. To an embittered man, for example, nearly everything will taste bitter, but this is both because he infects each new experience with his own bitterness and also because he consistently reaches out, with uncannily sure instinct, for those types of experience which will give him fresh cause for embitterment.

Although he [the plebeian] cannot deny that selfless courage and unswerving rectitude—indeed all the qualities of the patrician—exist as dreams in men’s minds, his mission is to destroy any belief that they have ever influenced, or ever could influence, the motive, character, and conduct of actual men and women. Whenever such ideals are put before us, he wants us to react to them as simply unbelievable.

The true patrician distinguishes always between what he has to concern himself with, from stark necessity or the dictates of duty, and what he (and everyone else) ought ideally to be concerning himself with, in the proper realm to which he rightly belongs.