[Ixa]

Man, elevating himself to the rank of the Titans, acquires his culture by his own efforts and compels the gods to unite with him, because in his self-sufficient wisdom he has their existence and their limits in his hand... The legend of Prometheus is an original possession of the entire Aryan family of races and attests to their prevailing talent for profound and tragic vision. In fact, it is not improbable that this myth has the same characteristic importance for the Aryan mind as the myth of the Fall has for the Semitic... Man's highest good must be bought with a crime and paid for by the flood of grief and suffering which the offended divinities visit upon the human race in its noble ambition. An austere notion, this, which by the dignity it confers on crime presents a strange contrast to the Semitic myth of the Fall--a myth that exhibits curiosity, deception, suggestibility, concupiscence, in short a whole series of principally feminine frailties, as the root of all evil. What distinguishes the Aryan conception is an exalted notion of active sin as the properly Promethean virtue...The tragedy at the heart of things, which the thoughtful Aryan is not disposed to quibble away, the contrariety at the center of the universe, is seen by him as an interpenetration of several worlds, as for instance a divine and a human, each individually in the right but each, as it encroaches upon the other, having to suffer for its individuality...Accordingly, crime is understood by the Aryans to be a man, sin by the Semites a woman; as also, the original crime is committed by man, the original sin by woman...(The Birth of Tragedy, Section 9)

The Greek State (1872): In face of the political world of the Hellenes, I will not hide those phenomena of the present in which I believe I discern dangerous atrophies of the political sphere equally critical for art and society. If there should exist men, who as it were through birth are placed outside the national- and state-instincts, who consequently have to esteem the state only insofar as they conceive that it coincides with their own interest, then such men will necessarily imagine as the ultimate political aim the most undisturbed collateral existence of great political communities possible, in which they might be permitted to pursue their own purposes without restriction. With this idea in their heads they will promote that policy which will offer the greatest security to these purposes; whereas it is unthinkable, that they, against their intentions, guided perhaps by an unconscious instinct, should sacrifice themselves for the state-tendency, unthinkable because they lack that very instinct. All other citizens of the state are in the dark about what nature intends with her state-instinct within them, and they follow blindly; only those who stand outside this instinct know what they want from the state and what the state is to grant them. Therefore it is almost unavoidable that such men should gain great influence in the state because they are allowed to consider it as a means, whereas all the others under the sway of those unconscious purposes of the state are themselves only means for the fulfillment of the state-purpose. In order now to attain, through the medium of the state the highest furtherance of their selfish aims, it is above all necessary, that the state be wholly freed from those awfully incalculable war-convulsions so that it may be used rationally; and thereby they strive with all their might for a condition of things in which war is an impossibility. For that purpose the thing to do is first to curtail and to enfeeble the political separatisms and factions and through the establishment of large equipoised state-bodies and the mutual safeguarding of them to make the successful result of an aggressive war and consequently war itself the greatest improbability; as on the other hand they will endeavor to wrest the question of war and peace from the decision of individual lords, in order to be able rather to appeal to the egoism of the masses or their representatives; for which purpose they again need slowly to dissolve the monarchic instincts of the nations. This purpose they attain best through the most general promulgation of the liberal optimistic view of the world, which has its roots in the doctrines of French Rationalism and the French Revolution, i.e., in a wholly un-Germanic, genuinely neo-Latin, shallow, and unmetaphysical philosophy. I cannot help seeing in the prevailing international movements of the present day, and the simultaneous promulgation of universal suffrage, the effects of the fear of war above everything else, yea I behold behind these movements, those truly international homeless money-hermits, as the really alarmed, who, with their natural lack of the state-instinct, have learned to abuse politics as a means of the Exchange, and state and society as an apparatus for their own enrichment. Against the deviation of the state tendency into a money-tendency, to be feared from this side, the only remedy is war and once again war, in the emotions of which this at least becomes obvious, that the state is not founded upon the fear of the war-demon, as a protective institution for egoistic individuals, but in love to fatherland and prince, it produces an ethical impulse, indicative of a much higher destiny. If I therefore designate as a dangerous and characteristic sign of the present political situation the application of revolutionary thought in the service of a selfish stateless money-aristocracy, if at the same time I conceive of the enormous dissemination of liberal optimism as the result of modern financial affairs fallen into strange hands, and if I imagine all evils of social conditions together with the necessary decay of the arts to have either germinated from that root or grown together with it, one will have to pardon my occasionally chanting a Paean on war.

Fear and intelligence. - If it is true, as is now most definitely asserted that the cause of black skin pigmentation is not to be sought in the action of light, could it perhaps not be the ultimate effect of frequent attacks of rage (and undercurrents of blood beneath the skin) accumulated over thousands of years? While with the other, more intelligent races an equally frequent terror and growing pallid has finally resulted in white skin? - For degree of timidity is a measure of intelligence, and frequently to give way to blind rage a sign that animality is still quite close and would like to take over again. (Daybreak, 241)

The purification of the race.- There are probably no pure races but only races that have become pure, even these being extremely rare. What is normal is crossed races, in which, together with a disharmony of physical features (when eye and mouth do not correspond with one another, for example), there must always go a disharmony of habits and value-concepts. (Livingstone heard someone say: 'God created white and black men but the Devil created the half-breeds.') Crossed races always mean at the same time crossed cultures, crossed moralities: they are usually more evil, crueller, more restless … Races that have become pure have always also become stronger and more beautiful.-The Greeks offer us the model of a race and culture that has become pure: and hopefully we shall one day also achieve a pure European race and culture. (Daybreak, Section 272)

Ours is the kingdom of the rabble... Rabble, however, means hotchpotch. Rabble-Hotchpotch: in that everything is mixed up with everything else, saint and scoundrel and gentleman and Jew and every beast out of Noah's ark. (Thus Spake Zarathustra)

The Jews--a people 'born for slavery,' as Tacitus and the whole ancient world say of them... (Beyond Good and Evil, 195)

The man of an era of dissolution which mixes the races together and who therefore contains within him the inheritance of a diversified descent…such a man of late cultures and broken lights will, on average, be a rather weak man: his fundamental desire is that the war which he is should come to an end... (Beyond Good and Evil 200)

We, who have a different faith; we, to whom the democratic movement is not merely a form assumed by political organization in decay but also a form assumed by man in decay, that is to say in diminishment, in process of becoming mediocre and losing his value: whither must the direct our hopes? Towards new philosophers, we have no other choice; towards spirits strong and original enough to make a start on antithetical evaluations and to revalue and reverse 'eternal values'; towards heralds and forerunners, towards men of the future who in the present knot together the constraint which compels the will of millennia on to new paths. To teach man the future of man as his will, as dependent on a human will, and to prepare for great enterprises and collective experiments in discipline and breeding so as to make an end of that gruesome dominion of chance and nonsense that has hitherto been called 'history'--the nonsense of the 'greatest number' is only its latest form--: for that a new kind of philosopher and commander will some time be needed, in face of whom whatever has existed on earth of hidden, dreadful and benevolent spirits may well look pale and dwarfed. It is the image of such leaders which hovers before our eyes. (Beyond Good and Evil, 203)

For skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain complex physiological condition called in ordinary language nervous debility and sickliness; it arises whenever races or classes long separated from one another are decisively and suddenly crossed. In the new generation, which has as it were inherited varying standards and values in its blood, all is unrest, disorder, doubt, experiment; the most vital forces have a retarding effect, the virtues themselves will not let one another grow and become strong, equilibrium, center of balance, upright certainty are lacking in body and soul. But that which becomes most profoundly sick and degenerates in such hybrids is the will: they no longer have any conception of independence of decision, of the valiant feeling of pleasure in willing—even in their dreams they doubt the "freedom of the will." Our Europe of today, the scene of a senselessly sudden attempt at radical class—and consequently race-mixture, is as a result skeptical from top to bottom, now with that agile skepticism which springs impatiently and greedily from branch to branch, now gloomily like a cloud overcharged with question marks and often sick to death of its will! Paralysis of will: where does one not find this cripple sitting today! (Beyond Good and Evil, 208)

It is quite impossible for a man not to have the qualities and predilections of his parents and ancestors in his constitution, whatever appearances may suggest to the contrary. This is the problem of race. Granted that one knows something of the parents, it is admissible to draw a conclusion about the child: any kind of offensive incontinence, any kind of sordid envy; or of clumsy self-vaunting--the three things which together have constituted the genuine plebeian type in all times--such must pass over to the child, as surely as bad blood; and with the help of the best education and culture one will only succeed in deceiving with regard to such heredity.--And what else does education and culture try to do nowadays! In our very democratic, or rather, very plebeian age, "education" and "culture" must be essentially the art of deceiving--deceiving with regard to origin, with regard to the inherited plebeianism in body and soul. (Beyond Good and Evil, 264)

The most frequent practice is for those of higher rank to name themselves according to their superiority in matters of power (as 'the powerful, 'the masters', 'those who command'), or according to the most visible sign of this superiority, as, for example, 'the wealthy', 'the owners' (that is the meaning of ARYA; and similar formulations can be found in Persian and Slavic)....The Latin malus [bad] (beside which I set melas [Greek: black, dark]) may designate the vulgar man as the dark-colored, above all as the black-haired man ("hic niger est—" [From Horace's Satires]), as the pre-Aryan occupant of the soil of Italy who was distinguished most obviously from the blond, that is Aryan, conqueror race by his color; Gaelic, at any rate, offers us a precisely similar case—fin (for example in the name Fin-Gal), the distinguishing word for nobility, finally for the good, noble, pure, originally meant the blond-headed, in contradistinction to the dark, black-haired aboriginal inhabitants. The Celts, incidentally, were a thoroughly blond race; it is wrong to associate traces of an essentially dark-haired people which appear on the more careful ethnographical maps of Germany with any sort of Celtic origin or blood-mixture, as Virchow still does: it is rather the pre-Aryan people of Germany who emerge in these places. (The same is true of virtually all Europe: the suppressed race has gradually recovered the upper hand again, in coloring, shortness of skull, perhaps even in the intellectual and social instincts: who can say whether modern democracy, even more modern anarchism and especially that inclination for "commune," for the most primitive form of society, which is now shared by all the socialists of Europe, does not signify in the main a tremendous counterattack—and that the conqueror and MASTER RACE, the Aryan, is not succumbing physiologically, too?....Our German gut [good] even: does it not signify "THE GODLIKE," the man of "GODLIKE RACE"? And is it not identical with the popular (originally noble) name of the Goths? (On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 5)

Whatever else has been done to damage the powerful and great of this earth seems trivial compared with what the Jews have done, that priestly people who succeeded in avenging themselves on their enemies and oppressors by radically inverting all their values, that is, by an act of the most spiritual vengeance. This was a strategy entirely appropriate to a priestly people in whom vindictiveness had gone most deeply underground. It was the Jew who, with frightening consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value equations good/noble/powerful/beautiful/ happy/favored-of-the-gods and maintain, with the furious hatred of the underprivileged and impotent, that "only the poor, the powerless, are good; only the suffering, sick, and ugly, truly blessed. But you noble and mighty ones of the earth will be, to all eternity, the evil, the cruel, the avaricious, the godless, and thus the cursed and damned!".... In reference to the grand and upspeakably disastrous initiative which the Jews have launched by this most radical of all declarations of war, I wish to repeat a statement I made in a different context (Beyond Good and Evil), to wit, that it was the Jews who started the slave revolt in morals; a revolt with two millennia of history behind it, which we have lost sight of today simply because it has triumphed so competely. (On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 7)

Let us stick to the facts: the people have won--or the 'slaves' or the 'plebeians' or the 'herd' or whatever you want to call them--and if the Jews brought this about, then so much the better! Never in world history did a people have a more important mission. The 'masters' are done away with; the morality of the common man has won. This victory might also be seen as a form of blood-poisoning (it has mixed the races together)--I shall not contradict that; but there is no doubt that the toxin has succeeded. The 'redemption' of humanity (from the 'masters', that is) is proceeding apace; everything is visibly becoming more Jewish or Christian or plebeian (what does the terminology matter!). The progress of this poison through the entire body of mankind seems inexorable. (On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 9)

These bearers of vindictive instincts that have to be bottled up, these descendants of all European and non-European slavery, especially, of the pre-Aryan population — these people, I say, represent the decline of humanity! These "tools of civilisation" are a disgrace to humanity, and constitute in reality more of an argument against civilisation, more of a reason why civilisation should be suspected... (On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 11)

Rome viewed Israel as a monstrosity; the Romans regarded the Jews as convicted of hatred against the whole of mankind -- and rightly so if one is justified in associating the welfare of the human species with absolute supremacy of aristocratic values.... The Romans were the strongest and most noble people who ever lived. (On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 16)

By way of comfort to the milksops, I would also venture the suggestion that in those days pain did not hurt as much as it does today; at least, that might be the conclusion of a physician who has treated Negroes (these taken as representative of primitive man--) for serious cases of internal inflammation; such inflammation would bring even the best organized European to the brink of despair--but this is not the case with Negroes. (On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Section 7)

Such a feeling of depression…may be the result of the miscegenation of too heterogeneous races (or of classes—genealogical and racial differences are also brought out in the classes: the European ‘Weltschmerz,’ the ‘Pessimism’ of the nineteenth century, is really the result of an absurd and sudden class-mixture. (On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, 17)

The last few weeks have brought me an essential teaching: I found the Lawbook of Manu . . . This absolutely Aryan product, a priestly codex of primeval heritage -- not pessimistic, however priestly it may be -- expands my notions about religion in the most remarkable way. I cannot escape the impression that everything else that we possess about great moral regulations appears to me to be an imitation and even a caricature of this book: above all Egyptianism; but even Plato appears to me in all his main points to be simply well educated by a Brahman. The Jews appear to be a chandala race that learned from their masters the principles according to which a priestly caste becomes master and a people is organized . . . . Medieval organization seems like a strange and halting attempt to regain the notions on which the ancient Indian-Aryan society rested -- but with pessimistic values that have their origin in the soil of race decadence. -- The Jews appear to be merely "mediators" -- they invented nothing. (Letter to Peter Gast, Samtliche Briefe, vol. VIII, 325.)

Ugliness is often enough the expression of a cross-bred development stunted by cross-breeding. If not, then it appears as a development in decline. The anthropologists among the criminologists tell us that the typical criminal is ugly: monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo [A monster in face, and monster in soul.]. But the criminal is a décadent. (Twilight of the Idols, 'The Problem of Socrates', Section 3)

Morality for physicians.— The sick man is a parasite of society. In a certain state it is indecent to live longer. To go on vegetating in cowardly dependence on physicians and machinations, after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, that ought to prompt a profound contempt in society. The physicians, in turn, would have to be the mediators of this contempt—not prescriptions, but every day a new dose of nausea with their patients ... To create a new responsibility, that of the physician, for all cases in which the highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands the most inconsiderate pushing down and aside of degenerating life—for example, for the right of procreation, for the right to be born, for the right to live... (Twilight of the Idols, "Skirmishes of an Untimely Man", 36)

"Equality" as a certain factual increase in similarity, which merely finds expression in the theory of "equal rights," is an essential feature of decline: the chasm between man and man, class and class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out—what I call the pathos of distance, that is characteristic of every strong age. (Twilight of the Idols, "Skirmishes of an Untimely Man", 37)

Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. One knows, indeed, what their ways bring: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic [genüsslich]—every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization ... For what is freedom? That one has the will to self-responsibility. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation, even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for one's cause, not excluding oneself. Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory dominate over other instincts, for example, over those of "pleasure." The human being who has become free—and how much more the spirit who has become free—spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamed of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior.— (Twilight of the Idols, "Skirmishes of an Untimely Man", 38)

Critique of modernity.— Our institutions are no good any more: on that there is unanimous agreement. However, it is not their fault but ours [Aber das liegt nicht an ihnen, sondern an uns]. Once we have lost all the instincts out of which institutions grow, we lose institutions altogether because we are no longer good for them. Democracy has ever been the form of decline in organizing power: in "Human, All-Too-Human" (I, 472) I already characterized modern democracy, together with its hybrids such as the "German Reich," as the form of decline of the state. In order that there may be institutions, there must be a kind of will, instinct, or imperative, which is anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations, forward and backward in infinitum ... The whole of the West no longer possesses the instincts out of which institutions grow, out of which a future grows: perhaps nothing antagonizes its "modern spirit" so much. One lives for the day, one lives very fast, one lives very irresponsibly: precisely this is called "freedom." That which makes an institution an institution is despised, hated, repudiated: one anticipates [glaubt] the danger of a new slavery the moment the word "authority" is even spoken out loud. That is how far décadence has advanced in the value-instincts of our politicians, our political parties: instinctively they prefer what disintegrates, what hastens the end ... (Twilight of the Idols, "Skirmishes of an Untimely Man", 39)

Today nobody has the courage any longer for privileges, for masters' rights, for a sense of respect for oneself and one's peers—for a pathos of distance ... Our politics is sick from this lack of courage!— (The Antichrist, 43)

The order of castes, the supreme, the dominant law, is merely the sanction of a natural order, a natural lawfulness of the first rank, over which no arbitrariness, no "modern idea" has any power...The order of castes, the order of rank, merely formulates the highest law of life; the separation of the three types is necessary for the preservation of society, to make possible the higher and the highest types—the inequality of rights is the first condition for the existence of any rights at all.— A right is a privilege. A man's state of being is his privilege...Whom do I hate most among the rabble of today? The socialist rabble, the chandala apostles, who undermine the instinct, the pleasure, the worker's sense of satisfaction with his small existence—who make him envious, who teach him revenge ... (The Antichrist, 57)

Against the doctrine of the milieu and external causes: the force within is infinitely superior; much that looks like external influence is merely its adaptation from within… A genius is not explained in terms of such conditions of his origin. (The Will to Power, 70)

It is quite in order that we possess no religion of oppressed Aryan races, for that is a contradiction: a master race is either on top or it is destroyed. (The Will to Power, 145)

The Jews tried to prevail after they had lost two of their castes, that of the warrior and that of the peasant; in this sense they are the ‘castrated’: they have the priests—and then immediately the chandala—... Because they knew the warrior only as their master, they brought into their religion enmity toward the noble, toward the exalted and proud, toward power, toward the ruling orders—: they are pessimists from indignation—Thus they created an important new posture: the priest at the head of the chandala—against the noble orders— (WTP 184)

The profound contempt with which the Christian was treated in the noble areas of classical antiquity is of a kind with the present instinctive aversion to the Jews: it is the hatred of the free and self-respecting orders for those who are pushing and who combine timid and awkward gestures with an absurd opinion of their own worth. (WTP 186)

The Jewish instinct of the ‘chosen’: they claim all the virtues for themselves without further ado, and count the rest of the world their opposites; a profound sign of a vulgar soul. (WTP 197)

People of the basest origin, in part rabble, outcasts not only from good but also from respectable society, raised away from even the smell of culture, without discipline, without knowledge, without the remotest suspicion that there is such a thing as conscience in spiritual matters; simply - Jews[.] (WTP 199)

In marriage in the aristocratic, old aristocratic sense of the word it was a question of the breeding of a race... - thus of the maintenance of a fixed, definite type of ruling man: man and owman were sacrificed to this point of view. ...What was decisive was the interest of a family, and beyond that - the class. ... (WTP, 732)

There are cases in which a child would be a crime: in the case of chronic invalids and neurasthenics of the third degree…After all, society has a DUTY here: few more pressing and fundamental demands can be made upon it. Society, as the great trustee of life, is responsible to life itself for every miscarried life—it also has to pay for such lives: consequently it ought to prevent them. In numerous cases, society ought to prevent procreation: to this end, it may hold in readiness, without regard to descent, rank, or spirit, the most rigorous means of constraint, deprivation of freedom, in certain circumstances castration.— The Biblical prohibition ‘thou shalt not kill’ is a piece of naivete compared with the seriousness of the prohibition of life to decadents: ‘thou shalt not procreate!’— Life itself recognizes no solidarity, no ‘equal rights’, between the healthy and the degenerate parts of an organism: one must excise the latter—or the whole will perish.— Sympathy for decadents, equal rights for the ill-constituted—that would be the profoundest immorality, that would be antinature itself as morality! (The Will to Power, 734)

The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men. I do not yet grant the failures the right. There are also peoples that are failures. (WTP 872)

I point to something new: certainly for such a democratic type there exists the danger of the barbarian, but one has looked for it only in the depths. There exists also another type of barbarian, who comes from the heights: a species of conquering and ruling natures in search of material to mold. Prometheus was this kind of barbarian. (The Will to Power, 900)

What means one has to employ with rude peoples, and that 'barbarous' means are not arbitrary and capricious, becomes palpable in practice as soon as one is placed, with all one's European pampering, in the necessity of keeping control over barbarians, in the Congo or elsewhere. (WTP 922)

There is only nobility of birth, only nobility of blood. (I am not speaking here of the little word "von" or of the Almanach de Gotha [Genealogy reference book of the royal families of Europe.]: parenthesis for asses.) When one speaks of "aristocrats of the spirit," reasons are usually not lacking for concealing something; as is well known, it is a favorite term among ambitious Jews. For spirit alone does not make noble; rather, there must be something to ennoble the spirit.-- What then is required? Blood. (WTP, 942)

The real issue is the production of the synthetic man… Lower men, the tremendous majority, are merely preludes and rehearsals out of whose medley the whole man appears here and there, the milestone man who indicates how far humanity has advanced so far. (The Will to Power, 881)

A question constantly keeps coming back to us, a seductive and wicked question perhaps: may it be whispered into the ears of those who have a right to such questionable questions, the strongest souls of today, whose best control is over themselves: is it not time, now that the type ‘herd animal’ is being evolved more and more in Europe, to make the experiment of a fundamental, artificial and conscious breeding of the opposite type and its virtues? And would it not be a kind of goal, redemption, and justification of the democratic movement itself if someone arrived who could make use of it—by finally producing beside its new and sublime development of slavery (--that is what European democracy must become ultimately) a higher race of dominating and Caesarian spirits who would stand upon it, maintain themselves by it, and elevate themselves through it? To new, hitherto impossible prospects, to their own prospects? (The Will to Power, 954)

I write for a species of man that does not yet exist: for the ‘masters of the earth.’ (The Will to Power, 958)