“A lack of self-mastery in small things brings about a crumbling of the capacity for it in great ones. Every day is ill employed, and a danger for the next day, in which one has not denied oneself some small thing at least once: this gymnastic is indispensable if one wants to preserve in oneself the joy of being one’s own master.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (trans. Hollingdale)
“All criminals force society back to a stage of culture earlier than the one at which it happens to be standing: they have a retrogressive effect. Consider the instruments society is obliged to create and maintain for itself for the sake of its own defence: the sly police agents, the prison warders, the executioners; do not overlook the public prosecutors and defence lawyers; and ask yourself, finally, whether the judges themselves, and punishment, and the whole process of the courts, are not phenomena much more likely to produce a depressive than an elevating effect on the non-criminal: for no one will ever succeed in covering self-defence and revenge with the cloak of innocence; and whenever man is employed and sacrificed as a means to an end of society’s all higher humanity mourns.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (trans. Hollingdale)