Success necessarily emasculates the spirit of rebellion. From the point of view of the true rebel the noblest cause is a lost cause. - R. W. K. Paterson

The true rebel … may incidentally lend his support to this or that finitely realizable cause, but his unique vocation is to keep the rebellious consciousness alive. In his eyes the crucial feature of any cause is the degree to which it fosters the spirit of private defiance.

As proprietor of his beliefs, the egoist never allows them to grow into ‘fixed ideas’: he never allows them to grow into sacrosanct dogmas, which he must not question or alter and of which he would therefore have become the prisoner.

They are supposed to be mature, and it is on this necessary supposition that their adulthood justifiably rests.