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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This, then, is the truth of the discourse of universal human rights: the Wall separating those covered by the umbrella of Human Rights and those excluded from its protective cover. Any reference to universal human rights as an 'unfinished project' to be gradually extended to all people is here a vain ideological chimera - and, faced with this prospect, do we, in the West, have any right to condemn the excluded when they use any means, inclusive of terror, to fight their exclusion?
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Money has lost its narrative quality the way painting did once upon a time. Money is talking to itself.
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Maybe we spend most of our decades being someone else, avoiding ourselves, maybe a man is only himself, his true self, for a few days in his entire life.
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I think we should look forward to death more than we do. Of course everybody hates to go to bed or miss anything, but dying is really the only chance we'll get to rest.
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America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem.
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A liar goes in fine clothes, a liar goes in rags, a liar is a liar, clothes or no clothes.
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