The modern European is characterized by two apparently opposite traits: individualism and the demand for equal rights; that I have at last come to understand. For the individual is an extremely vulnerable piece of vanity: conscious of how easily it suffers, this vanity demands that every other should count as its equal, that it should be only inter pares. In this way a social race is characterized in which talents and powers do not diverge very much. The pride that desires solitude and few admirers is quite beyond comprehension; a really “great” success is possible only through the masses, indeed one hardly grasps the fact any more that a success with the masses is always really a petty success: because pulchrum est paucorum hominum.

From Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Will to Power, New York: Vintage Books, 1968, pp. 410-411.