Nietzsche: You must first gain victory over yourselves if you want to gain any sort of victory over the opponents of your wealth.

The revolution-minded and the property-minded. —The only remedy against socialism that still remains in your power is: not to challenge it, that is, to live yourselves in a moderate and unpretentious way, to prevent as far as you can any exces­ sive displays of wealth and to come to the aid of the state when it places severe taxes upon everything superfluous and seem­ ingly luxurious. You don’t want this remedy? Then, you rich bourgeois who call yourselves “liberal,” just admit to your­ selves that it is your own heartfelt convictions that you find so frightening and threatening in the socialists, but that you consider unavoidable in yourselves, as though they were some­ thing different there. If you, such as you are, did not have your property and the concern for maintaining it, these con­ victions of yours would make you into socialists: only the pos­ session of property makes any difference between you and them. You must first gain victory over yourselves if you want to gain any sort of victory over the opponents of your wealth. — And if only that wealth really were well-being! It would not be so superficial and arouse so much envy, it would be more communicative, benevolent, egalitarian, helpful. But the spurious and histrionic air of your joy in life, which lies more in a feeling of opposition (that others do not have it and envy you for it) than in a feeling of the fulfillment and en­ hancement of your energies — your houses, clothes, vehicles, fancy stores, necessities for palate and table, your noisy enthusiasm for opera and music, and finally your women, formed and shaped, but out of base metal, gilded, but without the ring of gold, chosen by you as showpieces, giving themselves to you as showpieces: — these are what has spread the poison of the public sickness that now communicates itself faster and faster to the masses as socialist scabies, but that has its first seat and incubator in you. And who can now stem this plague?

• Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, (Spring 1878 — Fall 1879)