Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
If Islam despises Christianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so: Islam at least assumes that it is dealing with men.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the relationship between Islam and Christianity, suggesting that Islam holds a justified superiority in its perception of human nature.
Friedrich Nietzsche critiques Christianity from an Islamic perspective, implying that Islam's disdain for Christianity is grounded in its more realistic understanding of humanity. He suggests that while Christianity may have ideals, Islam confronts the human condition more honestly, and therefore possesses a legitimate reason to critique it.
In practice
In a debate about comparative religions, this quote can highlight the differences in how each religion views humanity.
Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness β as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne β and often the throne also on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators.
Reason is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.
The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin.
Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our antimaterialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.
Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it. Now I kill time and time kills me.
What is different in capitalist civilization has been two things. First, the process of meritocracy has been proclaimed as an official virtue instead of being merely a de facto reality. The culture has been different. And secondly, the percentage of the world's population for whom such ascent was possible has gone up. But even though it has grown up, meritocratic ascent remains very much the attribute of a minority.
Our knowledge springs from two fundamental sources of the mind; the first is the capacity of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions), the second is the power of knowing an object through these representations (spontaneity [in the production] of concepts).
I grew up in a tough neighborhood and we used to say you can get further with a kind word and a gun than just a kind word.
Science is about explaining the world, and religion is about interpreting it. There shouldn't be any conflict.
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