Oct 1, 2020
At present all your actions must be animated by one aim - namely, to bring everything down with a crash: the State as well as its moral standards. We alone will be left, we who have prepared ourselves beforehand to take over the government: the intelligent we shall bring over to our side, and the fools we shall use to carry us on their shoulders. You must not be shy of that. We must re-educate a generation to make it worthy of freedom. We shall have many thousands of Shatovs to deal with.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Devils (1871) | Magarshack translation, Part III, “A Very Busy Night” 6.1. After the murder of Shatov, Peter acknowledges the violence an intellectual vanguard must commit. Ends and means.