Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Species do not grow more perfect: the weaker dominate the strong, again and again- the reason being that they are the great majority, and they are also cleverer. Darwin forgot the mind (-that is English!): the weak possess more mind. ... To acquire mind, one must need mind-one loses it when one no longer needs it.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote explores the dynamics of power and intelligence in species, suggesting that the weaker often prevail due to their numerical advantage and cleverness.
Nietzsche's quote reflects on the idea that strength and perfection are not the only determinants of survival or success in nature. He argues that the majority, often perceived as weaker, can outsmart the strong through their numbers and intellectual abilities. This challenges the traditional notion of survival of the fittest and highlights the importance of adaptability and cunning over brute strength.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about evolution and survival, one might say, 'As Nietzsche observed, the weaker can often outsmart the strong.'
More from Friedrich Nietzsche
All quotes →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 — as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne — 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.
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To have a faith, therefore, or a trust in anything, where God hath not promised, is plain idolatry, and a worshipping of thine own imagination instead of God.
If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void.
There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death.
The danger of psychedelic drugs, the danger of mind-opening, the danger of consciousness expansion, the danger of inner discovery is a danger to the establishment.
The real question is not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you are alive before death.
The food we eat masks so much cruelty. The fact that we can sit down and eat a piece of chicken without thinking about the horrendous conditions under which chickens are industrially bred in this country is a sign of the dangers of capitalism, how capitalism has colonized our minds. The fact that we look no further than the commodity itself, the fact that we refuse to understand the relationships that underly the commodities that we use on a daily basis. And so food is like that.