In all practical operations, non-principled persons possess a distinctive advantage over “principled” ones. Honesty never succeeds for when it succeeds, it is not honesty. There is no fair play in Love and War; and all life is made up of Love and War. Genuinely honest men, die as a rule like dogs — in a ditch; and in business affairs they are “nowhere.” In their dotage or ‘in God’s good time’ — they (nearly always) go over the hill to State Infirmaries, unknown, friendless.

What chance has a conscientious man, when pitted in statesmanship, literature, or commerce, against the Organized Knavery of sanctimonious and powerful cut-throats? To them he is a pigeon to be plucked — a buck to be hunted — a criminal to be chained — a madman to be made sport of — a lamb to be skinned — a heretic to be — burnt alive.

Certainly it is not good strategy for a man to openly proclaim his loss of faith in conventional moralisms: if he desires to get-on in the world. A wiseling keeps his real sentiments on this point to himself — guards them as his own life. The best mask for moral heresy is one of pretended sanctity. It is very effective. Nearly all the Higher Thieves are ostentatiously pious. Thus when you hear pulpiteers and journalists vociferously proclaiming their profound acquiescence in “moral principles,” it is safe to conclude that they are engineering some subterranean swindle.

‘Belief’ is a war-stratagem — an instrument of deceit, a convenient falsification formula — a beautiful hoodwink. Hence it is, that very religious and very holy persons, are almost always thorough-going scoundrels at heart — utterly unreliable — utterly untrustworthy. Generally their whole lives are one long drawn our mendacity, and genuineness-of-Thought or Action is in their mind, attenuated to a mere sham.

Politicians, authors, pastors, ‘prophets,’ historians, philosophers, and editors, are notorious falsifiers of nature and fabricators of subterfuge. Soaked in unnaturalism, saturated through and through with delirium-breeding hashish-literature, they become organically incapable of speaking, let alone of thinking or writing honestly. Artificialism has trained them to be prevaricators, and prevaricators they must remain until the clods from the grave-diggers shovel rattle down on their coffin lids. As the Old Man of the Mountains trained his fanatical Assassins, and sent them forth to slay, so Civilization trains its Fiendling Intellectuals and sends them forth to assassinate Human Nature. They are the murderers of manliness — the regicides of Thought — the annihilators of heroism. Would that I had a legion of demons, to wring their necks. They have smothered the grand and masterful old Northern realisms beneath pestiferous rubbish-heaps of Oriental Mythology — of Hebrew old clothes. They repeat automatically in sounding diction, what has already been stuffed into them, as it were, with a ramrod. Their learning is the learning of the ‘learned pig’ in a menagerie; and their virtue is the virtue of a conscientious Jesuit. March of Mind they call it! — ‘As organs grind the note they’re set to…brains jejune…Grind, year in year out, the same Old Tune.’