"The Antichrist" by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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• "In brief, what he saw in Christian ethics, under all the poetry and all the fine show of altruism and all the theoretical benefits therein, was a democratic effort to curb the egoism of the strong—a conspiracy of the chandala against the free functioning of their superiors, nay, against the free progress of mankind."
• "Well, an idea is an idea. The present one may be right and it may be wrong. One thing is quite certain: that no progress will be made against it by denouncing it as merely immoral."
• "But in any battle between an institution and an idea, the idea, in the long run, has the better of it."
• "The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped."

• "the mob is the most ruthless of tyrants"
• "impatience is naturally most evident in those societies in which men in the mass are most influential"
• "The world needed a staggering exaggeration to make it see even half of the truth."
• "Two inferiorities struggle for the privilege of polluting the world."
• "Politics, under a democracy, reduces itself to a mere struggle for office by flatterers of the proletariat; even when a superior man prevails at that disgusting game he must prevail at the cost of his self-respect. Not many superior men make the attempt."
• "This book belongs to the most rare of men."
• "One must make one’s self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness of soul,—in contempt."
• "This is the sort of modernity that made us ill,—we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay."
• "What is evil?—Whatever springs from weakness."
• "The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures (—man is an end—): but what type of man must be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future."
• "The European of today, in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the Renaissance"
• "the process of evolution does not necessarily mean elevation, enhancement, strengthening"
• "Life itself appears to me as an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power: whenever the will to power fails there is disaster. My contention is that all the highest values of humanity have been emptied of this will—that the values of décadence, of nihilism, now prevail under the holiest names."
• "Christianity is called the religion of pity.—Pity stands in opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities."
• "Suffering is made contagious by pity"
• "Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect. Mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue (—in every superior moral system it appears as a weakness—)"
• "Nothing is more unhealthy, amid all our unhealthy modernism, than Christian pity."
• "What is truth? Truth has already been stood on its head when the obvious attorney of mere emptiness is mistaken for its representative...."
• "The pathetic thing that grows out of this condition is called faith: in other words, closing one’s eyes upon one’s self once for all, to avoid suffering the sight of incurable falsehood."
• "“eternity.” I unearth this theological instinct in all directions: it is the most widespread and the most subterranean form of falsehood to be found on earth."
• "the best liars in Germany; they lie innocently...."
• "A virtue must be our invention; it must spring out of our personal need and defense. In every other case it is a source of danger."
• "That which does not belong to our life menaces it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the concept of “virtue,” as Kant would have it, is pernicious. “Virtue,” “duty,” “good for its own sake,” goodness grounded upon impersonality or a notion of universal validity—these are all chimeras"
• "every man find his own virtue, his own categorical imperative"
• "What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire, without pleasure—as a mere automaton of duty? That is the recipe for décadence, and no less for idiocy...."
• "They behave like women, all these great enthusiasts and prodigies—they regard “beautiful feelings” as arguments"
• "conviction as the criterion of truth"
• "dearth of intellectual conscience"
• "When a man feels that he has a divine mission, say to lift up, to save or to liberate mankind—when a man feels the divine spark in his heart and believes that he is the mouthpiece of super natural imperatives—when such a mission inflames him, it is only natural that he should stand beyond all merely reasonable standards of judgment."
• "The most valuable intuitions are the last to be attained; the most valuable of all are those which determine methods."
• "As a man of science, he belonged to the Chandala .... We have had the whole pathetic stupidity of mankind against us—their every notion of what the truth ought to be, of what the service of the truth ought to be—their every “thou shalt” was launched against us...."
• "It was our modesty that stood out longest against their taste...."
• "The “pure spirit” is a piece of pure stupidity: take away the nervous system and the senses, the so-called “mortal shell,” and the rest is miscalculation—that is all!..."
• "Mankind has just as much need for an evil god as for a good god"
• "What would be the value of a god who knew nothing of anger, revenge, envy, scorn, cunning, violence?"
• "Wherever the will to power begins to decline, in whatever form, there is always an accompanying decline physiologically"
• "The collapse of a god: he became a “thing-in-itself."
• "Christianity is indebted to the scholars of India.—Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity—it is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly; it is the product of long centuries of philosophical speculation. The concept, “god,” was already disposed of before it appeared. Buddhism is the only genuinely positive religion to be encountered in history"
• "The things necessary to Buddhism are a very mild climate, customs of great gentleness and liberality, and no militarism"
• "Cheerfulness, quiet and the absence of desire are the chief desiderata, and they are attained. Buddhism is not a religion in which perfection is merely an object of aspiration: perfection is actually normal."
• "Under Christianity the instincts of the subjugated and the oppressed come to the fore: it is only those who are at the bottom who seek their salvation in it. Here the prevailing pastime, the favourite remedy for boredom is the discussion of sin, self-criticism, the inquisition of conscience; here the emotion produced by power (called “God”) is pumped up (by prayer); here the highest good is regarded as unattainable, as a gift, as “grace.”
• "Christian, too, is a certain cruelty toward one’s self and toward others; hatred of unbelievers; the will to persecute."
• "Christian is all hatred of the intellect, of pride, of courage, of freedom, of intellectual libertinage; Christian is all hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy in general...."
• "Christianity had to embrace barbaric concepts and valuations in order to obtain mastery over barbarians"
• "Buddhism is a religion for peoples in a further state of development, for races that have become kind, gentle and over-spiritualized (—Europe is not yet ripe for it—): it is a summons that takes them back to peace and cheerfulness, to a careful rationing of the spirit, to a certain hardening of the body."
• "Buddhism, I repeat, is a hundred times more austere, more honest, more objective. It no longer has to justify its pains, its susceptibility to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin—it simply says, as it simply thinks, “I suffer.” To the barbarian, however, suffering in itself is scarcely understandable: what he needs, first of all, is an explanation as to why he suffers. (His mere instinct prompts him to deny his suffering altogether, or to endure it in silence.) Here the word “devil” was a blessing: man had to have an omnipotent and terrible enemy—there was no need to be ashamed of suffering at the hands of such an enemy."
• "it is of very little consequence whether a thing be true or not, so long as it is believed to be true. Truth and faith: here we have two wholly distinct worlds of ideas, almost two diametrically opposite worlds—the road to the one and the road to the other lie miles apart"
• "a man gets any pleasure out of the notion that he has been saved from sin, it is not necessary for him to be actually sinful, but merely to feel sinful"
• "Love is the state in which man sees things most decidedly as they are not. The force of illusion reaches its highest here, and so does the capacity for sweetening, for transfiguring. When a man is in love he endures more than at any other time; he submits to anything."
• "Psychologically considered, “sins” are indispensable to every society organized on an ecclesiastical basis; they are the only reliable weapons of power"
• "the psychology of the Saviour.—I confess, to begin with, that there are very few books which offer me harder reading than the Gospels."
• "The true life, the life eternal has been found—it is not merely promised, it is here, it is in you; it is the life that lies in love free from all retreats and exclusions, from all keeping of distances."
• "a feeling of being at home in a world in which no sort of reality survives, a merely “inner” world, a “true” world, an “eternal” world...."
• "love, as the only, as the ultimate possibility of life...."
•  "It is greatly to be regretted that no Dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood"
• "With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”
• "the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory."
• "The “kingdom of God” is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a “millennium”—it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere...."
• "There are days when I am visited by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy—contempt of man."
• "I take care not to hold mankind responsible for its lunacies."
• "a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but actually lies—and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through “innocence” or “ignorance.”"
• "whom I despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am unhappily contemporaneous. The man of today—I am suffocated by his foul breath!..."
• "what a monster of falsehood the modern man must be to call himself nevertheless, and without shame, a Christian!"
• "I shall go back a bit, and tell you the authentic history of Christianity.—The very word “Christianity” is a misunderstanding—at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross."
• "people always talk of their “faith” and act according to their instincts...."
• "Obviously, the little community had not understood what was precisely the most important thing of all: the example offered by this way of dying, the freedom from and superiority to every feeling of ressentiment—a plain indication of how little he was understood at all! All that Jesus could hope to accomplish by his death, in itself, was to offer the strongest possible proof, or example, of his teachings in the most public manner.... But his disciples were very far from forgiving his death—though"
• "the essential difference between the two religions of décadence: Buddhism promises nothing, but actually fulfils; Christianity promises everything, but fulfils nothing."
• "What he himself didn’t believe was swallowed readily enough by the idiots among whom he spread his teaching."
• "When the centre of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in “the beyond”—in nothingness—then one has taken away its centre of gravity altogether."
• "Our politics is sick with this lack of courage!"
• "gospels cannot be read too carefully; difficulties lurk behind every word. I confess—I hope it will not be held against me—that it is precisely for this reason that they offer first-rate joy to a psychologist—as the opposite of all merely naïve corruption, as refinement par excellence, as an artistic triumph in psychological corruption."
• "they say “judge not,” and yet they condemn to hell whoever stands in their way"
• "Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose!"
• "What follows, then? That one had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very advisable."
• "it is an honour to have an “early Christian” as an opponent"
• "Such a religion as Christianity, which does not touch reality at a single point and which goes to pieces the moment reality asserts its rights at any point, must be inevitably the deadly enemy of the “wisdom of this world,” which is to say, of science—and it will give the name of good to whatever means serve to poison, calumniate and cry down all intellectual discipline, all lucidity and strictness in matters of intellectual conscience, and all noble coolness and freedom of the mind."
• "As a matter of fact no man can be a philologian or a physician without being also Antichrist. That is to say, as a philologian a man sees behind the “holy books,” and as a physician he sees behind the physiological degeneration of the typical Christian. The physician says “incurable”; the philologian says “fraud.”..."
• "Against boredom even gods struggle in vain."
• "The old God was seized by mortal terror. Man himself had been his greatest blunder; he had created a rival to himself; science makes men godlike"
• "How is one to protect one’s self against science? For a long while this was the capital problem. Answer: Out of paradise with man! Happiness, leisure, foster thought—and all thoughts are bad thoughts!—Man must not think.—And so the priest invents distress, death, the mortal dangers of childbirth, all sorts of misery, old age, decrepitude, above all, sickness—nothing but devices for making war on science! The troubles of man don’t allow him to think...."
• "Man has had to fight for every atom of the truth, and has had to pay for it almost everything that the heart, that human love, that human trust cling to."
• "Greatness of soul is needed for this business: the service of truth is the hardest of all services."
• "The whole earth as a madhouse?"
• "Christianity has the rancour of the sick at its very core—the instinct against the healthy, against health. Everything that is well-constituted, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offence to its ears and eyes."
• "Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity."
• "Christianity also stands in opposition to all intellectual well-being,—sick reasoning is the only sort that it can use as Christian reasoning; it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it pronounces a curse upon “intellect,” upon the superbia of the healthy intellect."
• "all straight, straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge must be banned by the church as forbidden ways. Doubt is thus a sin from the start...."
• "“Faith” means the will to avoid knowing what is true."
• "the art of reading with profit—the capacity for absorbing facts without interpreting them falsely, and without losing caution, patience and subtlety in the effort to understand them."
• "In the very tone in which a martyr flings what he fancies to be true at the head of the world there appears so low a grade of intellectual honesty and such insensibility to the problem of “truth,” that it is never necessary to refute him."
• "Truth is not something that one man has and another man has not"
• "One may rest assured that the greater the degree of a man’s intellectual conscience the greater will be his modesty, his discretion, on this point."
• "Is the worth of a cause altered by the fact that some one had laid down his life for it?"
• "Women are still on their knees before an error because they have been told that some one died on the cross for it."
• "folly taught them that the truth is proved by blood. But blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth; blood poisoneth even the purest teaching and turneth it into madness and hatred in the heart." (quotations are from “Also sprach Zarathustra”)
• "great intellects are sceptical"
• "The strength, the freedom which proceed from intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power, manifest themselves as scepticism."
• "Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far enough, they do not see what is below them"
• "A mind that aspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto, is necessarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction belongs to strength, and to an independent point of view...."
• "Conviction as a means: one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction."
• "But the grandiose attitudes of these sick intellects, these intellectual epileptics, are of influence upon the great masses—fanatics are picturesque, and mankind prefers observing poses to listening to reasons...."
• "The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offence."
• "There are questions regarding the truth or untruth of which it is not for man to decide; all the capital questions, all the capital problems of valuation, are beyond human reason.... To know the limits of reason—that alone is genuine philosophy...."
• "it gives even the most fastidious psychologist something to sink his teeth into"
• "The superior caste—I call it the fewest—has, as the most perfect, the privileges of the few: it stands for happiness, for beauty, for everything good upon earth. Only the most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum hominum: [30] goodness is a privilege. Nothing could be more unbecoming to them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that sees ugliness—or indignation against the general aspect of things."
• "The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others.... Knowledge—a form of asceticism.—They are the most honourable kind of men: but that does not prevent them being the most cheerful and most amiable."
• "the inequality of rights is essential to the existence of any rights at all.—A right is a privilege"
• "Every one enjoys the privileges that accord with his state of existence. Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts the heights—the cold increases, responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity."
• "To the mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness; they have a natural instinct for mastering one thing, for specialization. It would be altogether unworthy of a profound intellect to see anything objectionable in mediocrity in itself. It is, in fact, the first prerequisite to the appearance of the exceptional"
• "When the exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not merely kindness of heart—it is simply his duty...."
• "What is bad? But I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge."
• "The Christian and the anarchist: both are décadents; both are incapable of any act that is not disintegrating, poisonous, degenerating, blood-sucking; both have an instinct of mortal hatred of everything that stands up, and is great, and has durability, and promises life a future...."
• "Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme...."
• "The whole labour of the ancient world gone for naught: I have no word to describe the feelings that such an enormity arouses in me.—And, considering the fact that its labour was merely preparatory, that with adamantine self-consciousness it laid only the foundations for a work to go on for thousands of years, the whole meaning of antiquity disappears!... To what end the Greeks? to what end the Romans?—All the prerequisites to a learned culture, all the methods of science, were already there; man had already perfected the great and incomparable art of read ing profitably—that first necessity to the tradition of culture, the unity of the sciences; the natural sciences, in alliance with mathematics and mechanics, were on the right road,—the sense of fact, the last and more valuable of all the senses, had its schools, and its traditions were already centuries old!"
• "Christianity destroyed for us the whole harvest of ancient civilization, and later it also destroyed for us the whole harvest of Mohammedan civilization."
• "The crusaders later made war on something before which it would have been more fitting for them to have grovelled in the dust—a civilization beside which even that of our nineteenth century seems very poor and very “senile.”—What they wanted, of course, was booty: the orient was rich.... Let us put aside our prejudices! The crusades were a higher form of piracy, nothing more!"
• "The German nobility stands outside the history of the higher civilization: the reason is obvious.... Christianity, alcohol—the two great means of corruption...."
• "there has never been a more critical question than that of the Renaissance"
• "a perfectly heavenly enchantment and spectacle:—it seems to me to scintillate with all the vibrations of a fine and delicate beauty, and within it there is an art so divine, so infernally divine, that one might search in vain for thousands of years for another such possibility; I see a spectacle so rich in significance and at the same time so wonderfully full of paradox that it should arouse all the gods on Olympus to immortal laughter—Cæsar Borgia as pope!... Am I understood?... Well then, that would have been the sort of triumph that I alone am longing for today—: by it Christianity would have been swept away!—What happened? A German monk, Luther, came to Rome. This monk, with all the vengeful instincts of an unsuccessful priest in him, raised a rebellion against the Renaissance in Rome...."
• "Instead there was life! Instead there was the triumph of life! Instead there was a great yea to all lofty, beautiful and daring things!..."
• "I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race...."