And everyone will be happy, all the millions of beings, except the hundred thousand who govern them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, only we shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy children, and a hundred thousand martyrs who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. They will die in peace, depart peacefully in Your name, and beyond the grave will encounter only death. But we shall withhold the secret and, to keep them happy, we shall opiate them with promises of eternal reward in heaven. Because even if there really were anything in the hereafter, it certainly would not be for such as them. It is said and prophesied that You will return triumphant, that You will come with your chosen ones, Your proud and mighty ones, but we shall tell them that they saved only themselves, whereas we have saved everyone. And we who have, for their own happiness, taken upon ourselves their sins, we shall stand before you and say: “Judge us if You can and if You dare.”

From Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers, translated by Ignat Avsey, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998 (first published in 1994), p. 326.