Top 100 Nihilism Quotes & Sayings

Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current so-called positive values, to which it remains bound.

We should not accept moral nihilism unless we find strong arguments to do so.

Moral nihilism comes with a price we can now see.

Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.

I'm a Nietzschean scholar. I've read an immense amount about nihilism and existentialism.

Nihilism: any aim is lacking, any answer to the question "why" is lacking. What does nihilism mean?--that the supreme values devaluate themselves.

Famously, there's not really anywhere to go after nihilism. It's not progressing toward anything, it's a statement of outrage, however brilliant.

Courage is impulsive; it is narcissism tempered with nihilism.

Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.

If all men lead mechanical, unpoetical lives, this is the real nihilism, the real undoing of the world.

The Universe will now be set right. Made over to fit my unique view of what should be. Let Nihilism reign supreme!

Nihilism is best done by professionals.

Suicide attacks are the actions of losers who have nothing left to lose. In this case, Islam serves as a mask, a cover for desperation and nihilism, but not for religion.

... a widespread secularization increasingly descends into a moral, intellectual, and spiritual nihilism that denies not only the One who is the Truth but the very idea of truth itself.

I don't see any point in nihilism... just as I suppose the nihilist sees no point in everything else.

Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

The weird nihilism that permeates Mellon Collie is extremely relevant to what's going on right now. So many kids are intelligent and articulate, but they don't know what to do with themselves.

I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don't think most artists feel their work is meaningless.

The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.

Christian theology is a hair's breadth away from nihilism.

For me, the more I think about the problems of the world, I feel I have to be positive. I wouldn't like to fall into cynicism or nihilism. That's not in my nature.

I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that's the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up - either religious or social laws - become meaningless.

Nihilism, there's really nothing to it.

...What is at stake is civilization and humanity, nothing less. The idea that everything is permitted, as Nietzsche put it, rests on the premise of nihilism and has nihilistic implications. I will not pretend that the case against nihilism and for civilization is an easy one to make. We are here confronting the most fundamental of philosophical questions, on the deepest levels. In short, the matter of pornography and obscenity is not a trivial one, and only superficial minds can take a bland and untroubled view of it.

Nietzsche saw that ultimately the problem of nihilism is the problem of what to do with time: Why keep investing in the future when there is no longer any transcendental guarantor, a positive end of time as ultimate reconciliation or redemption, ensuring a pay-off for this investment? Nietzsche's solution - his attempted overcoming of nihilism - consists in affirming the senselessness of becoming as such - all becoming, without reservation or discrimination.

Just to say "Well, God is dead" in one breath is to say, in another, that nothing means anything. This is the moment of nihilism. Nihilism is the affirmation of meaninglessness.

Nihilism is a natural consequence of a culture (or civilization) ruled and regulated by categories that mask manipulation, mastery and domination of peoples and nature.

Are there any good arguments in defence of moral nihilism? I think not.

That is the most extreme form of nihilism: nothingness (the "meaningless") eternally!

People have to be engaged. Enough of nihilism! Enough of emptiness and defeatism! Fighting for a better world is not only the decent thing to do, it is also fun; it is meaningful and fulfilling.

There are many options for how images can aggregate not to nihilism, but to significance, or to meaning.

My grandfather was a practising Quaker. My father was a nihilist. But nihilism, if you like, is the beginning of faith anyway.

Your drive to produce hard-edged opinions stoked by hostility is likely a sign that you've been brainwashed by the pedestrian influences of pop nihilism.

Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism.

The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky.

The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.

That is why I have called feminism nihilism. It says that being a woman is nothing definite and that the duty of women is to advance that nothingness as a cause.

In Nietzsche's view nihilism is not a Weltanschauung that occurs at some time and place or another; it is rather the basic character of what happens in Occidental history.

The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it.

For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness.

Scientists are skeptics. It's unfortunate that the word 'skeptic' has taken on other connotations in the culture involving nihilism and cynicism. Really, in its pure and original meaning, it's just thoughtful inquiry.

If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.

If critics and fanboys weren't suckers for simplistic nihilism and high-pressure marketing, Afterlife would be universally acclaimed as a visionary feat, superior to Inception and Avatar on every level.

Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.

For indeed Christianity was complicit in the death of antiquity, and in the birth of modernity, not because it was an accomplice of the latter, but because it, alone in the history of the West, constituted a rejection of and alternative to nihilism's despair, violence, and idolatry of power; as such, Christianity shattered the imposing and enchanting facade behind which nihilism once hid, and thereby, inadvertently, called it forth into the open.

Though nihilism has been relentlessly criticized for overemphasizing the dark side of human experience, it might be equally true that this overemphasis represents a needed counterbalance to shallow optimism and arrogant confidence in human power. Nihilism reminds us that we are not gods, and that despite all of the accomplishments and wonders of civilization, humans cannot alter the fact that they possess only a finite amount of mastery and control over their own destinies.

Nihilism is.not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one shoulder to the plough; one destroys.

Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.

The philosophy that prepares a revolution and the sentiment that underpins the philosophy have, in every case the two pillars of nihilism and mysticism.

The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.

It is of note that for a long time moral nihilism was a kind of unquestioned default position in analytic moral philosophy.

Cynicism was a school in Greece - the Cynics. Diogenes is a famous Cynic. There was a strong belief in nihilism and narcissism. Those are old schools too.

Our own civilization has lost its way, and this makes us even more vulnerable to Islamist nihilism.

Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism.

Meaning is malleable: take it out, you get nihilism and despair. Put it in, you get sacredness and something most special.

The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism - nay, it is identical with nihilism.

Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.

It is complete nihilism to propose laying down arms in a world where atom bombs are around. It is very simple: there is no way of achieving peace other than with weapons.

I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism.

The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i.e., that we know nothing more than our own representations.