"…You make it sound quite nice, but it's all meaningless."
Perhaps a passionate idealist's speech would receive applause, but whenever ideals clashed with people's personal benefits, cruel reality and practical brute force would forever tell him that the world was really ruled by violence.
Did nobody hope that this cruel world would become slightly better? Did no genius ever discover a path to improving the world? Of course people did, but intelligent people were typically physically weak. In this cruel world, any righteous path that wasn't backed up by force wouldn't get anywhere at all.
"I need power in order to spread reason. I need to have even more power than those who act as they please."