Defeat
No man likes to be beaten. But to be beaten by the man who has always stood as the particular example of mediocrity in his eyes, to start by the side of this mediocrity and to watch it shoot up, while he struggles and gets nothing but a boot in his face, to see the mediocrity snatch from him, one after another, the chances he’d give his life for, to see the mediocrity worshipped, to miss the place he wants and to see the mediocrity enshrined upon it, to lose, to be sacrificed, to be ignored, to be beaten, beaten, beaten – not by a greater genius, not by a god, but by a Peter Keating – well, my little amateur, do you think the Spanish Inquisition ever thought of a torture to equal this?
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
