Because you are a great nobleman, you think yourself a great genius! Nobility, fortune, rank position: all these make one so proud! What have you done to win so many advantages? You have taken the trouble to be born, and nothing more! For the rest, you are a man ordinary enough! While, as for me, lost in the obscure crowd, I have had to use more knowledge and planning merely to exist than have been expended over the last hundred years governing all of Spain. - Beaumarchais, Marriage of Figaro (1784)