The Anti-Christ Quotes

“El Evangelio murió en la cruz. Lo que a partir de aquel momento se llamó evangelio era lo contrario de lo que él vivió; una mala nueva, un "Dysangelium".”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily understands me — I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops — and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him .... He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand manner — to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm .... Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self ....
Very well, then! of that sort only are my readers, my true readers, my readers foreordained: of what account are the rest? — The rest are merely humanity. — One must make one’s self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness of soul, — in contempt.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“When the pre-requisites of ascending life, when everything strong, plucky, masterful and proud has been eliminated from the concept of God, and step by step he has sunk down to the symbol of a staff for the weary, of a last straw for all those who are drowning; when he becomes the pauper’s God, the sinner’s God, the sick man’s God par excellence, and the attribute “Saviour,” “Redeemer,” remains over as the one essential attribute of divinity: what does such a metamorphosis, such an abasement of the godhead imply? —Undoubtedly, “the kingdom of God” has thus become larger. Formerly all he had was his people, his “chosen” people. Since then he has gone travelling over foreign lands, just as his people have done; since then he has never rested anywhere: until one day he felt at home everywhere, the Great Cosmopolitan — until he got the “greatest number,” and half the world on his side. But the God of the “greatest number,” the democrat among gods, did not become a proud heathen god notwithstanding: he remained a Jew, he remained the God of the back streets, the God of all dark corners and hovels, of all the unwholesome quarters of the world!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“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 supernatural imperatives — when such a mission inflames him, it is only natural that he should stand beyond all merely reasonable standards of judgment. He feels that he is himself sanctified by this mission, that he is himself a type of a higher order!”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“The fate of the Gospels was decided by death — it hung on the “cross.”... It was only death, that unexpected and shameful death; it was only the cross, which was usually reserved for the canaille only — it was only this appalling paradox which brought the disciples face to face with the real riddle: “Who was it? what was it?”—The feeling of dis may, of profound affront and injury; the suspicion that such a death might involve a refutation of their cause; the terrible question, “Why just in this way?” — this state of mind is only too easy to understand. Here everything must be accounted for as necessary; everything must have a meaning, a reason, the highest sort of reason; the love of a disciple excludes all chance. Only then did the chasm of doubt yawn: “Who put him to death? who was his natural enemy?” — this question flashed like a lightning-stroke. Answer: dominant Judaism, its ruling class.
From that moment, one found one’s self in revolt against the established order, and began to understand Jesus as in revolt against the established order. Until then this militant, this nay-saying, nay-doing element in his character had been lacking; what is more, he had appeared to present its opposite. 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 ....”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“The problem I set in this work is not what will replace mankind in the order of living being! (—Man is an end—); but, what type of man must be reared, must be willed, as having the higher value, as being the most worthy of life and the surest guarantee of the future.
This more valuable type has appeared often enough already: but as a happy accident, as an exception, never as willed. He has rather been precisely the most feared; hitherto he has been almost the terrible in itself; — and from out the very fear he provoked there arose the will to rear the type which has how been reared, attained: the domestic animal, the gregarious animal, the sick animal man, — the Christian.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“Mankind has ventured to call pity a virtue (—in every superior moral system it appears as a weakness—); going still further, it has been called the virtue, the source and foundation of all other virtues—but let us always bear in mind that this was from the standpoint of a philosophy that was nihilistic, and upon whose shield the denial of life was inscribed.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“When the center of gravity of life is placed, not in life itself, but in "the beyond" in nothingness then one has taken away its center of gravity altogether. The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all natural instinct henceforth, everything in the instincts that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning: this is now the "meaning" of life. Why be public spirited? Why take any pride in descent and forefathers? Why labor together, trust one another, or concern one's self about the common welfare, and try to serve it? Merely so many "temptations," so many strayings from the "straight path." " One thing only is necessary". That every man, because he has an "immortal soul," is as good as every other man; that in an infinite universe of things the "salvation" of every individual may lay claim to eternal importance; that insignificant bigots and the three fourths insane may assume that the laws of nature are constantly suspended in their behalf it is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnification of every sort of selfishness to infinity, to insolence. And yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable flattery of personal vanity for its triumph it was thus that it lured all the botched, the dissatisfied, the fallen upon evil days, the whole refuse and off scouring of humanity to its side. The "salvation of the soul" in plain English: "the world revolves around me." The poisonous doctrine, " equal rights for all," has been propagated as a Christian principle: out of the secret nooks and crannies of bad instinct Christianity has waged a deadly war upon all feelings of reverence and distance between man and man, which is to say, upon the first prerequisite to every step upward, to every development of civilization out of the ressentiment of the masses it has forged its chief weapons against us , against everything noble, joyous and high spirited on earth, against our happiness on earth. To allow "immortality" to every Peter and Paul was the greatest, the most vicious outrage upon noble humanity ever perpetrated. And let us not underestimate the fatal influence that Christianity has had, even upon politics! Nowadays no one has courage any more for special rights, for the right of dominion, for feelings of honorable pride in himself and his equals for the pathos of distance. Our politics is sick with this lack of courage! The aristocratic attitude of mind has been undermined by the lie of the equality of souls; and if belief in the "privileges of the majority" makes and will continue to make revolutions it is Christianity, let us not doubt, and Christian valuations, which convert every revolution into a carnival of blood and crime! Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the "lowly" lowers.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“Who alone has any reason for living his way out of reality? The man who suffers under it. But to suffer from reality one must be a botched reality.... The preponderance of pains over pleasures is the cause of this fictitious morality and religion: but such a preponderance also supplies the formula for décadence....”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“These are the two physiological realities upon and out of which the doctrine of salvation has sprung. I call them a sublime super-development of hedonism upon a thoroughly unsalubrious soil. What stands most closely related to them, though with a large admixture of Greek vitality and nerve-force, is epicureanism, the theory of salvation of paganism. Epicurus was a typical décadent: I was the first to recognize him.—The fear of pain, even of infinitely slight pain—the end of this can be nothing save a religion of love....”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“What was a lie in the father becomes a conviction in the son.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“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?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

“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.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

“As long as the priest is considered a higher type of person — this professional negater, slanderer, poisoner of life — there will not be an answer to the question: What is truth? Truth has already been turned on its head when someone who consciously champions nothingness and negation passes for the representative of ‘truth’ . . .”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“Christianity was not “national,” it was not based on race — it appealed to all the varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere. 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.
Again I remind you of Paul’s priceless saying: “And God hath chosen the weak things of the world, the foolish things of the world, the base things of the world, and things which are despised” (1 Corinthians i, 27, 28): this was the formula; in hoc signo the décadence triumphed. — God on the cross — is man always to miss the frightful inner significance of this symbol? — Everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is divine .... We all hang on the cross, consequently we are divine .... We alone are divine .... Christianity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed by it.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“Parasitism as the only practice of the church; with is anemic and "holy" ideals, sucking all the blood, all the love, all the hope out of life; the beyond as the will to deny all reality; the cross as the distinguishing mark of the most subterranean conspiracy ever heard of - against health, beauty, well-being, intellect, kindness of soul - against life itself...”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“Men of convictions are prisoners. [...] A mind that aspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto, is necessarily sceptical.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“[of Christianity] All thoughts are bad thoughts. Man must not think.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“[of Christianity] Science is the first of sins, the germ of all sins, the original sin. This is all there is of morality.—“Thou shall not know.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“What is Jewish, what is Christian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; unhappiness polluted with the idea of "sin"; well-being represented as danger, as a "temptation"; a physiological disorder produced by the canger worm of conscience...”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“And Christian is all hatered of the intellect, of pride, of courage, of freedom, of intellectual libertinage; Christian is all hatered of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy in general...”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“The pure soul is a pure lie. So long as the priest, that professional denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is accepted as a higher variety of man, there can be no answer to the question "What is truth?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“With this I come to a conclusion and pronounce my judgment. I condemn Christianity; I bring against the Christian church the most terrible of all the accusations that an accuser has ever had in his mouth. It is, to me, the greatest of all imaginable corruptions; it seeks to work the ultimate corruption, the worst possible corruption. The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity; it has turned every value into worthlessness, and every truth into a lie, and every integrity into baseness of soul.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum, — overnight it destroyed the vast achievement of the Romans: the conquest of the soil for a great culture that could await its time. Can it be that this fact is not yet understood? The imperium Romanum that we know, and that the history of the Roman provinces teaches us to know better and better, — this most admirable of all works of art in the grand manner was merely the beginning, and the structure to follow was not to prove its worth for thousands of years. To this day, nothing on a like scale sub specie aeterni has been brought into being, or even dreamed of! — This organization was strong enough to withstand bad emperors: the accident of personality has nothing to do with such things — the first principle of all genuinely great architecture. But it was not strong enough to stand up against the corruptest of all forms of corruption — against Christians ....
These stealthy worms, which under the cover of night, mist and duplicity, crept upon every individual, sucking him dry of all earnest interest in real things, of all instinct for reality — this cowardly, effeminate and sugar-coated gang gradually alienated all “souls,” step by step, from that colossal edifice, turning against it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had found in the cause of Rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their own pride. The sneakishness of hypocrisy, the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black as hell, such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the unio mystica in the drinking of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of Chandala revenge — all that sort of thing became master of Rome...”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“Originally, and above all in the time of the monarchy, Israel maintained the right attitude of things, which is to say, the natural attitude. Its Jahveh was an expression of its consciousness of power, its joy in itself, its hopes for itself: to him the Jews looked for victory and salvation and through him they expected nature to give them whatever was necessary to their existence―above all, rain.
Jahveh is the god of Israel, and consequently the god of justice: this is the logic of every race that has power in its hands and a good conscience in the use of it. In the religious ceremonial of the Jews both aspects of this self-approval stand revealed. The nation is grateful for the high destiny that has enabled it to obtain dominion; it is grateful for the benign procession of the seasons, and for the good fortune attending its herds and its crops.―This view of things remained an ideal for a long while, even after it had been robbed of validity by tragic blows: anarchy within and the Assyrian without. But the people still retained, as a projection of their highest yearnings, that vision of a king who was at once a gallant warrior and an upright judge―vision best visualized in the typical prophet (i. e., critic and satirist of the moment), Isaiah.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“His marks begin to show upon the writing of the younger Germans of today. They are getting away from the old thunderous manner, with its long sentences and its tedious grammatical complexities. In the course of time, I daresay, they will develop a German almost as clear as French and almost as colourful and resilient as English.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ By Friedrich Nietzsche

“Važila je nada kod Grka kao zlo nad zalima kao izuzetno podmuklo zlo: ono je ostavljano u bačvi zla.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“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 reading 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! Is all this properly understood? Every essential to the beginning of the work was ready: — and the most essential, it cannot be said too often, are methods, and also the most difficult to develop, and the longest opposed by habit and laziness.
What we have today reconquered, with unspeakable self-discipline, for ourselves — for certain bad instincts, certain Christian instincts, still lurk in our bodies — that is to say, the keen eye for reality, the cautious hand, patience and seriousness in the smallest things, the whole integrity of knowledge — all these things were already there, and had been there for two thousand years! More, there was also a refined and excellent tact and taste! Not as mere brain-drilling! Not as “German” culture, with its loutish manners! But as body, as bearing, as instinct — in short, as reality ....”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“Los débiles y los fracasados deben perecer; ésta es la primera proposición de nuestro amor a los hombres. Y hay que ayudarlos a perecer. ¿Qué es lo más perjudicial que cualquier vicio? La acción compasiva hacia todos los fracasados y los débiles: el cristianismo.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, El Anticristo