"… The most general formula at the basis of every religion and morality is: ‘Do this and this, refrain from this and this — and you will be happy! Otherwise… .’ Every morality, every religion is this imperative — I call it the great original sin of reason, immortal unreason. In my mouth this formula is converted into its reverse — first example of my ‘revaluation of all values’: a well-constituted human being, a ‘happy one’, must perform certain actions and instinctively shrinks from other actions, he transports the order of which he is the physiological representative into his relations with other human beings and with things. In a formula: his virtue is the consequence of his happiness … . Long life, a plentiful posterity is not the reward of his virtue, virtue itself is rather just that slowing down of the metabolism which also has, among other things, a long life, a plentiful posterity, in short Cornarism, as its outcome. — The Church and morality say: ‘A race, a people perishes through vice and luxury’. My restored reason says: when a people is perishing, degenerating physiologically, vice and luxury (that is to say the necessity for stronger and stronger and more and more frequent stimulants, such as every exhausted nature is acquainted with) follow therefrom. A young man grows prematurely pale and faded. His friends say: this and that illness is to blame. I say: that he became ill, that he failed to resist the illness, was already the consequence of an impoverished life, an hereditary exhaustion. The newspaper reading says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished — it is no longer secure in its instincts. Every error, of whatever kind, is a consequence of degeneration of instinct, disgregation of the will: one has thereby virtually defined the bad. Everything good is instinct — and consequently easy, necessary, free. Effort is an objection, the god is typically distinguished from the hero (in my language: light feet are the first attribute of divinity)… ."