“The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.”
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report
“When a man feels that he has a divine mission, say to lift up, to save or to liberate mankind‐‐when a man feels the divine spark in his heart and believes that he is the mouthpiece of supernatural imperatives‐‐ when such a mission inflames him, it is only natural that he should stand beyond all merely reasonable standards of judgment. He feels that he is himself sanctified by this mission, that he is himself a type of a higher order! . . . What has a priest to do with philosophy! He stands far above it!‐‐And hitherto the priest has ruled!‐‐He has determined the meaning of “true” and “not true”!”
Friedrich Nietzsche
