"An honorable statesman, 'a truly magnanimous and courageous man,' should prefer 'affability' and 'high-mindedness' to 'useless and hateful peevishness.' But Cicero acknowledged that 'gentleness and clemency must be commended only as far as severity may also be employed for the sake of the commonwealth.' Cicero’s honorable statesman is equally distant from the amoral self-assertion of the Nietzschean 'Over-man,' contemptuous as he is of his inferiors and of the deep aversion to the legitimate exercise of authority by the contemporary humanitarian. His standard is the 'honestum'—the fine, the noble, the honorable—at the service of civilized liberty. He resists the siren calls of both hardness—tyranny, cruelty, and an immoral power politics—and softness, which is tenderness, compassion, or generosity bereft of any deep understanding of human nature or of the 'inventiveness of wickedness,' as Edmund Burke once so suggestively called it." Daniel Mahoney