The purpose of culture would have us enlist everything terrible, step by step and experimentally, into its service; but before it is strong enough for this it must combat, moderate, mask, and even curse everything terrible.
Wherever a culture points to anything as evil, it betrays its fear and therefore weakness.
Thesis: everything good is the evil of yore which has been rendered serviceable. Standard: the more terrible and the greater the passions may be which an age, a people, and an individual are at liberty to possess, because they are able to use them as a means, the higher is their culture: the more mediocre, weak, submissive, and cowardly a man may be, the more things he will regard as evil: according to him the kingdom of evil is the largest. The lowest man will see the kingdom of evil (i.e. that which is forbidden him and which is hostile to him) everywhere.
1026.
It is not a fact that "happiness follows virtue"—but it is the mighty man who first declares his happy state to be virtue.
Evil actions belong to the mighty and the virtuous: bad and base actions belong to the subjected.
The mightiest man, the creator, would have to be the most evil, inasmuch as he makes his ideal prevail over all men in opposition to their ideals, and remoulds them according to his own image.
Evil, in this respect, means hard, painful, enforced.
Such men as Napoleon must always return and always settle our belief in the self-glory of the individual afresh: he himself, however, was corrupted by the means he had to stoop to, and had lost noblesse of character. If he had had to prevail among another kind of men, he could have availed himself of other means; and thus it would not seem necessary that a Cæsar must become bad.