Nietzche: The Genealogy of Morality

[…] Now it is obvious to me, first, that, following this theory, the true original source of
the concept “good” has been sought and presupposed in the wrong place: the judgment “good”
did not come from those to whom “goodness” was shown! On the contrary it was “the good”
themselves, that is, the noble, powerful, high-stationed, and high-minded who felt and posited
themselves and their activity as good, that is, of the first rank, in contradistinction to all that is
low, low-minded, common, and vulgar. It was out of this pathos of distance4 that they first took
the right to create value and to coin names for values. What does utility have to do with them!
The viewpoint of utility is, with regards to such a fiery eruption of the highest rank-ordering,
rank-distinguishing value-judgments, precisely as alien and inappropriate as possible: here the
feeling has attained just the opposite, the tepid warmth that every calculating cleverness, every
utility calculus requires – and not just once, not for one exceptional hour, but for the long term.
The pathos of nobility and distance, as I said, the enduring and dominating complete and
fundamental feeling of a higher ruling type in relation to a lower type, to a “below” – that is the
origin of the opposition “good” and “bad.” (The lordly right of giving names extends so far that
we should allow ourselves to conceive the origin of language itself as the power-expression of
those ruling: they say “that is that and that,” they stamp every thing and event with a sound and
thereby, as it were, take possession of it.) In light of this origin, the word “good” is not from the
outset bound up necessarily with “unegoistic” actions, as is the superstition of every genealogist
of morality. Instead, only with the decline of aristocratic value-judgments did it come to pass
that the entire opposition of “egoistic” and “unegoistic” could not help but insert itself more and
more into human conscience. It is, to make use of my language, the herd instinct that with this
antithesis finally gets its word (and also its words) in.