No man likes to be beaten. But to be beaten by a man who has always stood as a particular example of mediocrity in his eyes, top 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 have given his life for, to see the mediocrity worshiped, to miss the place he wants and to see mediocrity enshrined upon it, to lose, to be sacrificed, to be ignored, to be beaten, beaten, beaten ————not by a greater genius, not by god, but by a Peter Keating —— well, my little amateur, do you think the Spanish Inquisition ever thought of torture to equal this?

— Ellsworth Toohey to Dominique Francon (via shecallsmeartemis)

To be beaten by mediocrity.