Ben Macintyre Quotes

A daily dose of Nietzsche goes a long way.

Nietzsche's ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community.

The Gay Science, section 108

This world is the will to power and nothing besides!

Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.

They didn't teach Nietzsche in the philosophy department at Harvard; philosophy there was strictly analytical stuff and the poetic ramblings of Nietzsche did not belong. And see - you are teaching it in a literature class - so they must have been right.

[Friedrich] Nietzsche said something marvellous, he said "Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty", and this is fanaticism.

You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.

Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.

Nietzsche's my favorite. He's just insane.

Our drives are reducible to the will to power. The will to power is the ultimate fact at which we arrive.

The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power - and nothing else!

Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal.

The superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the superman is to be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, be true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.

Nietzche . . . he was a confirmed Life Force worshipper. It was he who raked up the Superman, who is as old as Prometheus; and the 20th century will run after this newest of the old crazes when it gets tired of the world, the flesh, and your humble servant.

[Zarathustra] never abandoned the watchword of not having any end, not serving a cause, because, as he knew, causes pluck off the wings we fly with.

Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to live.

It was Heraclitus' ideas that seized Nietzsche so totally that he became completely mad.

I should like to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche somewhere in a train or a steamer, and to spend the whole night talking to him. I consider his philosophy won't last long, however. It's more showy than convincing.

God is dead, but considering the state the species man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.

The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can't.

You highest men whom I have ever seen! This is my suspicion about you and my secret laughter: I guess that you would call my superman--a devil!

Friedrich Nietzsche--the prophet of restless young men everywhere

Societies organized for the interplay of individual self-interest can collapse into manic tribalism, if not nihilistic violence.

I like Nietzsche. I quote him in many of my books. He was born 100 years before me.