_Injuring with one's best Qualities._—Our strong points sometimes drive us so far forward that we cannot any longer endure our weaknesses, and we perish by them: we also perhaps see this result beforehand, but nevertheless do not want it to be otherwise. We then become hard towards that which would fain be spared in us, and our pitilessness is also our greatness. Such an experience, which must in the end cost us our life, is a symbol of the collective effect of great men upon others and upon their epoch:—it is just with their best abilities, with that which only _they_ can do, that they destroy much that is weak, uncertain, evolving, and _willing_, and are thereby injurious. Indeed, the case may happen in which, taken on the whole, they only do injury, because their best is accepted and drunk up as it were solely by those who lose their understanding and their egoism by it, as by too strong a beverage; they become so intoxicated that they go breaking their limbs on all the wrong roads where their drunkenness drives them. 29. _Adventitious Liars._—When people began to combat the unity of Aristotle in France, and consequently also to defend it, there was once more to be seen that which has been seen so often, but seen so unwillingly:—_people imposed false reasons on themselves_ on account of which those laws ought to exist, merely for the sake of not acknowledging to themselves that they had _accustomed_ themselves to the authority of those laws, and did not want any longer to have things otherwise. And people do so in every prevailing morality and religion, and have always done so: the reasons and intentions behind the habit, are only added surreptitiously when people begin to combat the habit, and _ask_ for reasons and intentions. It is here that the great dishonesty of the conservatives of all times hides:—they are adventitious liars. 30.