Careful what you wish for

“The Socialists desire to create a comfortable life for as many as possible.  If the enduring homeland of this comfortable life, the perfect state, were really to be attained, then the comfortable life would destroy the soil out of which great intellect and the powerful individual in general grows: by which I mean great energy.  If this state is achieved mankind will have become too feeble still to be able to produce the genius.  Ought one therefore not to desire that life should retain its violent character and savage forces and energies continue to be called up again and again?  The warm, sympathizing heart will, of course, desire precisely the abolition of that savage and violent character of life, and the warmest heart one can imagine would long for it the most passionately: and yet precisely this passion would nonetheless have derived its fire, its warmth, indeed its very existence from that savage and violent character of life; the warmest heart thus desires the abolition of its own foundation, the destruction of itself.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)