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Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche– On the Genealogy of Morals

 If we place ourselves at the end of this tremendous process of the evolution of the inner life in the human animal, where the tree at last brings forth fruit…, then we discover that the ripest fruit is the sovereign individual, like only to himself, liberated again from morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral.

In short, the man who has his own independent, protracted will and the right to make promises – and in him a proud consciousness, quivering in every muscle, of what has at length been achieved and become flesh in him, a consciousness of his own power and freedom, a sensation of mankind come to completion.

This emancipated individual, with the actual right to make promises, this master of a free will, this sovereign man – how should he not be aware of his superiority over all those who lack the right to make promises and stand as their own guarantors

And how this mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all more short willed and unreliable creatures?

The ‘free man’, the possessor of a protracted and unbreakable will, also possesses his measure of value.  The proud awareness of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and over fate, has in his case penetrated to the profoundest depths and become instinct, the dominating instinct.