Thus do I speak to you in parables, you who make the soul giddy, you preachers of equality! You are tarantulas and dealers in hidden revengefulness!
…I pull at your web that your rage may lure you from your cave of lies and your revenge may bound forward from behind your word ‘justice’.
For that man may be freed from the bonds of revenge: that is the bridge to my highest hope and a rainbow after protracted storms.
But naturally the tarantulas would have it differently. ‘That the world may become full of the storms of our revenge, let precisely that be called justice by us’ – thus they talk together.
‘We shall practise revenge and outrage against all who are not as we are’ – thus the tarantula-hearts promise themselves.
‘And “will to equality” – that itself shall henceforth be the name of virtue; and we shall raise outcry against everything that has power!’
You preachers of equality, thus from you the tyrant-madness of impotence cries for ‘equality’: thus your most secret tyrant-appetite disguises itself in words of virtue.
Soured self-conceit, repressed envy, perhaps your fathers’ self-conceit and envy: they burst from you as a flame and madness of revenge.
They resemble inspired men: but it is not the heart that inspires them – it is revenge. And when they become refined and cold, it is not their mind, it is their envy that makes them refined and cold.
…Revenge rings in all their complaints, a malevolence is in all their praise: and to be judge seems bliss to them.
Thus, however, I advise you, my friends: Mistrust all in whom the urge to punish is strong!
…Mistrust all those who talk much about their justice! Truly, it is not only honey that their souls lack.
And when they call themselves ‘the good and just’, do not forget that nothing is lacking to make them into Pharisees except – power!
…There are those who preach my doctrine of life: yet are at the same time preachers of equality, and tarantulas.
That they speak well of life, these poison spiders, although they sit in their caves and with their backs turned on life, is because the want to do harm by speaking well of life.
They want to do harm to those who now possess power: for with those the preaching of death is still most at home.
If it were otherwise, the tarantulas would teach otherwise: and it is precisely they who were formerly the best world-slanderers and heretic-burners.
I do not want to be confused with these preachers of equality, nor taken for one of them. For justice speaks thus to me: ‘Men are not equal.’
And they should not become so, either! For what were my love of the Superman if I spoke otherwise?
-Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Of the Tarantulas’, Thus Spoke Zarathustra