"It is the shared bad faith by which individuals help each other sustain the illusion that they can shirk their spiritual destiny by joining the public."

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Nietzsche ... argues that all that passes in the life of a society is ephemeral and banausic except for the presence of great personalities, of men like Goethe ... who seem to forge their own destinies, who seem to move unhampered by those burdens of existence which keep most men from rising above the vicissitudes of their daily toil.

— John Carroll