Friedrich Nietzsche

"Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying "there are only facts," I should say: no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations."

"I now myself live, in every detail, striving for wisdom, while I formerly merely worshipped and idolized the wise."

"Morality is: the mediocre are worth more than the exceptions ... I abhore Christianity with a deadly hatred."

"Socrates was the plebeian dissector of an aristocratic society; Nietzsche is the aristocratic dissector of a plebeian society."

"All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and then I can turn the world upside down."

"Along with ignoring the French Revolution, one of the most telling features of the new books on atheism [cf. new atheism ] is their consistent refusal to engage Nietzsche, who, if read correctly, ought to make atheists squirm far more than he has ever caused discomfit to believers. ¶ First, he turned the critical methods of the Enlightenment against their inventors and showed that Enlightened faith in progress was just as illusory as belief in an afterlife. Second, he demanded that a critical philosophy stop pretending to be a substitute religion (he shrewdly called Hegelian idealism “insidious theology”). Third, he insisted on the indissoluble bond between Christian doctrine and Christian morality and poured contempt on novelists like George Eliot for supposing otherwise [...] ¶ Perhaps this why Nietzsche said in Ecce Homo, “the most serious Christians have always been well disposed toward me.” For they at least, unlike Dawkins, Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, can see that after Nietzsche a moral critique of the Christian God has become impossible, for it denies the very presupposition that makes its own critique possible. Like Abraham asking if the Lord God of justice could not himself do justice, protest atheism must accept the very norms that Nietzsche showed are essential to the meaning of belief. In Nietzsche alone one reads what the world really looks like si Deus non sit [if God does not exist]."