I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.

The line is commonly cited to capture a strain of Dostoyevskian egoism: the speaker prefers a small private comfort (tea) even at the cost of universal catastrophe, dramatizing the temptation to place personal desire above moral responsibility. Read this way, it functions less as a programmatic statement by Dostoyevsky than as a deliberately shocking formulation of ethical solipsism—useful for exposing how easily “principle” collapses into appetite. In Dostoyevsky’s fiction, such blunt declarations often serve as diagnostic moments, revealing a character’s spiritual sickness or the modern will’s readiness to bargain away the world for a trivial certainty.