"Do you know the hallmark of the second-rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement.
"Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of
the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement
to admire. They bare their teeth at you from out of their rat holes, thinking that you take pleasure in letting your
brilliance dim them - while you'd give a year of your life to see a flicker of talent anywhere among them.
"They envy achievement, and their dream of greatness is a world where all men have become their acknowledged inferiors.
They don't know that that dream is the infallible proof of mediocrity, because that sort of world is what the man of
achievement would not be able to bear. They have no way of knowing what he feels when surrounded by inferiors - hatred?
no, not hatred, but boredom - the terrible, hopeless, draining, paralyzing boredom. Of what account are praise and
adulation from men you don't respect?
"Have you ever felt the longing for someone you could admire? For something, not to look down at, but up to?"
-- Dr. Robert Stadler, to Dagny Taggart in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged
