A Quote by Kurt Vonnegut

The trouble with being a secular humanist is that we don't have a congregation. We don't meet so it's a very flimsy tribe, but there's a wonderful quotation from Nietzsche. Nietzsche said, Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of skepticism. Something perfectly is going on. I do not doubt it, but the explanations I hear do not satisfy me.
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.
I rather shared Nietzsche's conception of the kind of individual that an ideal education should be cultivating. 'Authenticity' is not Nietzsche's term, but as used by some existentialists, it nicely captures what Nietzsche admired - the resolve of an individual person to forge his or her own 'table of values', to be emancipated from strait-jacketing conventions, traditions, and ideologies. As embodied in the 'Overman', authenticity is the antidote to 'bad' nihilism.
I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.
Nietzsche was so intelligent and advanced. And that's how I am. I'm the black, basketball-playing Nietzsche.
Neither Kierkegaard nor Nietzsche had the slightest interest in starting a movement – or a new system, a thought which would indeed have offended them. Both proclaimed, in Nietzsche's phrase, Follow not me, but you!
In August, 1900, [Friedrich] Nietzsche was laid to rest Nietzsche, as the apostle of atheism, heralded the darkest century the world has ever known.
It will come as no surprise that I would count Nietzsche the perspectivist - he who questioned not only the possibility but the value of Truth - as the enemy. There will be even fewer surprises that I would reject the Dionysian Nietzsche, the celebrant of transgressive desire.
where Nietzsche's response to the equation of socialism and morality was to question the value of morality, at least as it had been customarily understood, economists like Mises and Hayek pursued a different path, one Nietzsche would never have dared to take: they made the market the very expression of morality.
Nietzsche should not be taken seriously as a political theorist, at least not at the level of his positive prescriptions. But the Nietzsche who denounces the insipidity and mediocrity that result from democracy's levelling impulses could not be more acute.
In the helter-skelter of this book, I didn't develop my views as theory. In fact, I even believe that efforts of that kind are tainted with ponderousness. Nietzsche wrote "with his blood," and criticizing, or, better, experiencing him means pouring out one's lifeblood. It was only with my life that I wrote the Nietzsche book that I had planned.
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.
Look at Mann's reading habits, his explicit comments on Nietzsche, and his copy of Birth of Tragedy, and it starts to seem doubtful that this work of Nietzsche's played much role in the gestation of the novella.
You say, 'Well, I love secular music.' Let me just share something with you: I don't care. I'm not going to go there; this is what I'm going to tell you: It doesn't matter to me whether it's secular or Christian. My question is, what's being said in those words? Because if what's being said in those words contradicts the will of God, you're violating His will, and you're loving it.
If in Nietzsche's thinking the prior tradition of Western thought is gathered and completed in a decisive respect, then the confrontation with Nietzsche becomes one with all Western thought hitherto.
Like Nietzsche, Heidegger also gave up on the prospect that schools and universities would nurture the kind of reflective openness to the way of things that, certainly by the 1940s, he identified with authentic thinking. The authentic person is not the Promethean, iron-willed figure that pops up in Nietzsche, but someone more like the Daoist sages whom Heidegger admired.
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