Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Madness is uncommon in individuals but prevalent in larger groups and societies.
This quote by Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that while individual acts of madness are rare, when people come together as groups, such as in parties, nations, or during particular historical periods, irrational behavior tends to become the norm. This reflects the idea that collective consciousness can lead to a loss of individual rationality, resulting in decisions and actions that may seem mad when viewed from a personal perspective.
Themes
MadnessGroupsIndividualsSocietyIrrationality
In practice
Example use cases
During a political rally, one might quote Nietzsche to illustrate the collective mindset of a crowd.
More from Friedrich Nietzsche
All quotes βThat which does not kill us makes us stronger.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
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.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
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.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
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Ah, why should all mankind For one man's fault, be condemned, If guiltless?
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How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash.
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Let men learn that a legislature is not 'our God upon earth,' though, by the authority they ascribe to it, and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is at the best borrowed.
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I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footingβ¦. Iβm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.
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