“Whenever a person reveals something, one can ask: what is it supposed to conceal? From what is it supposed to divert the eyes? What prejudice is it supposed to arouse? And additionally: how far does the subtlety of this dissimulation go? And in what way has it failed?” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (trans. Hollingdale)
“In our youth we take our teachers and guides from the time in which we happen to live and the circle in which we happen to move: we are thoughtlessly confident that the times we live in are bound to have teachers better suited to us than to anyone else and that we are bound to find them without much trouble. For this childishness we have in later years to pay a heavy price: we have to expiate our teachers in ourself. We then perhaps go in search of our true guides throughout the whole world, the world of the past included—but perhaps it is too late. And in the worst case we discover that they were living when we were young—and that we missed them.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“The poor sheep say to their shepherd: ‘go on ahead and we shall never lack the courage to follow you’. The poor shepherd, however, thinks to himself: ‘follow me and I shall never lack the courage to lead you’.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (trans. Hollingdale)
“If one stays silent for a year one unlearns chattering and learns to speak.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (trans. Hollingdale)
“Poor, happy and independent!—these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave!—these things can also go together—and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves: provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness! To the devil with the belief that higher payment could lift from them the essence of their miserable condition—I mean their impersonal enslavement! To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue! To the devil with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of a machine! Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations—the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible? What you ought to do, rather, is hold up to them the counter-reckoning: how great a sum of inner value is thrown away in pursuit of this external goal! But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely? if you no longer possess the slightest power over yourselves? if you all too often grow weary of yourselves like a drink that has been left too long standing? if you pay heed to the newspapers and look askance at your wealthy neighbour, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions? if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs? if voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very well suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait and wait for something to happen from outside and in all other respects go on living as you have always lived—until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and at last the day of the bestia triumphans dawns in all its glory?”– Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“Above all, in every state it is necessary, both by the laws and every other method possible, to prevent those who are employed by the public from being venal.” — Aristotle, A Treatise on Government (trans. Ellis)
“It is a general maxim in democracies, oligarchies, monarchies, and indeed in all governments, not to let any one acquire a rank far superior to the rest of the community, but rather to endeavour to confer moderate honours for a continuance than great ones for a short time; for these latter spoil men, for it is not every one who can bear prosperity: but if this rule is not observed, let not those honours which were conferred all at once be all at once taken away, but rather by degrees. But, above all things, let this regulation be made by the law, that no one shall have too much power, either by means of his fortune or friends.” — Aristotle, A Treatise on Government (trans. Ellis)
“Governments are sometimes preserved not only by having the means of their corruption at a great distance, but also by its being very near them; for those who are alarmed at some impending evil keep a stricter hand over the state; for which reason it is necessary for those who have the guardianship of the constitution to be able to awaken the fears of the people, that they may preserve it, and not like a night-guard to be remiss in protecting the state, but to make the distant danger appear at hand.” — Aristotle, A Treatise on Government (trans. Ellis)
“In well-tempered governments it requires as much care as anything whatsoever, that nothing be done contrary to law: and this ought chiefly to be attended to in matters of small consequence; for an illegality that approaches insensibly, approaches secretly.” — Aristotle, A Treatise on Government (trans. Ellis)
“Those who would establish aristocratical governments are mistaken not only in giving too much power to the rich, but also in deceiving the common people; for at last, instead of an imaginary good, they must feel a real evil, for the encroachments of the rich are more destructive to the state than those of the poor.” — Aristotle, A Treatise on Government (trans. Ellis)
“How little Christianity educates the sense of honesty and justice can be gauged fairly well from the character of its scholars’ writings: they present their conjectures as boldly as if they were dogmas and are rarely in any honest perplexity over the interpretation of a passage in the Bible. Again and again they say ‘I am right, for it is written—’ and then follows an interpretation of such imprudent arbitrariness that a philologist who hears it is caught between rage and laughter and asks himself: is it possible? Is this honourable? Is it even decent?—How much dishonesty in this matter is still practised in Protestant pulpits, how grossly the preacher exploits the advantage that no one is going to interrupt him here, how the Bible is pummelled and punched and the art of reading badly is in all due form imparted to the people: only he who never goes to church or never goes anywhere else will underestimate that. But after all, what can one expect from the effects of a religion which in the centuries of its foundation perpetrated that unheard-of philological farce concerning the Old Testament: I mean the attempt to pull the Old Testament from under the feet of the Jews with the assertion it contained nothing but Christian teaching and belonged to the Christians as the true people of Israel, the Jews being only usurpers. And then there followed a fury of interpretation and construction that cannot possibly be associated with a good conscience: however much the Jewish scholars protested, the Old Testament was supposed to speak of Christ and only of Christ, and especially of his Cross; wherever a piece of wood, a rod, a ladder, a twig, a tree, a willow, a staff is mentioned, it is supposed to be a prophetic allusion to the wood of the Cross; even the question of the one-horned beast and the brazen serpent, even Moses spreading his arms in prayer, even the spits on which the Passover lamb was roasted—all allusions to the Cross and as it were preludes to it! Has anyone who asserted this ever believed it?”– Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“Of all pleasures, which is the greatest for the men of that little, constantly imperilled community which is in a constant state of war and where the sternest morality prevails?—for souls, that is to say, which are full of strength, revengefulness, hostility, deceit and suspicion, ready for the most fearful things and made hard by deprivation and morality? The pleasure of cruelty: just as it is reckoned a virtue in a soul under such conditions to be inventive and insatiable in cruelty. In the act of cruelty the community refreshes itself and for one throws off the gloom of constant fear and caution. Cruelty is one of the oldest festive joys of mankind.”– Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“Maybe it wouldn’t much matter where we ended up. Chinese ports are busy, and if the time in port is too short no one would get off anyway. Some of the men said they wouldn’t go ashore even if there was time. It was expensive, and possibly dangerous. Ordinary Seaman Alvin Piamonte said the Mafia had taken root in China, and he wasn’t going ashore unless he had two or three guys with him, which could be impossible to arrange given everyone’s schedules. The ports the men most loved—the ones in Brazil, Australia, Vietnam—were friendly, warm, and relaxed. They used to like American ports, but after 2001, as part of the Global War on Terror, the United States abrogated centuries of international practice by severely restricting foreign seafarers’ ability to go ashore. The men of the Odyssey always became agitated when discussing this. The only country as restrictive as the U.S., they said, was Saudi Arabia. In the words of the second mate, ‘It has taken the little happiness we had, and made it less.’ The only way to cheer the men at such points was to remind them of Bangkok. In Bangkok, as soon as you arrive, a boat comes alongside and disgorges a portable bar, a restaurant, and many friendly young women. If you pay in advance, a woman will move into your cabin for several days, sleep with you, and get up in the morning and iron your shirts—all for about thirty dollars a day. In some ports, the authorities turn a blind eye to this sort of thing. In Bangkok, according to [Chief Mate] Vadim, if you try to kick the party off your ship, your cargo simply won’t get unloaded. For this reason, seamen love Bangkok.” – Keith Gessen, “Polar Express”
“If alms were bestowed only out of pity all the beggars would have starved to death. The greatest bestower of alms is cowardice.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (trans. Hollingdale)
“A lack of self-mastery in small things brings about a crumbling of the capacity for it in great ones. Every day is ill employed, and a danger for the next day, in which one has not denied oneself some small thing at least once: this gymnastic is indispensable if one wants to preserve in oneself the joy of being one’s own master.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (trans. Hollingdale)
“All criminals force society back to a stage of culture earlier than the one at which it happens to be standing: they have a retrogressive effect. Consider the instruments society is obliged to create and maintain for itself for the sake of its own defence: the sly police agents, the prison warders, the executioners; do not overlook the public prosecutors and defence lawyers; and ask yourself, finally, whether the judges themselves, and punishment, and the whole process of the courts, are not phenomena much more likely to produce a depressive than an elevating effect on the non-criminal: for no one will ever succeed in covering self-defence and revenge with the cloak of innocence; and whenever man is employed and sacrificed as a means to an end of society’s all higher humanity mourns.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (trans. Hollingdale)
“It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (trans. Hollingdale)
“So long as you are praised think only that you are not yet on your own path but on that of another.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (trans. Hollingdale)
“If we consider how even now all great political occurrences creep on to the stage silent and shrouded, how they are concealed by insignificant events and seem small in proximity to them, how it is not until long after they have happened that their profound effects are felt and the ground trembles—what significance can we then accord the press as it is now, with its daily expenditure of lungpower on exclaiming, deafening, inciting, shocking—is it anything more than the permanent false alarm that leads ears and senses off in the wrong direction?”– Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“A Christian who ventured upon forbidden pathways of thought might well ask himself one day: is it really necessary that there should actually be a God, and a deputizing Lamb of God, if belief in the existence of these things suffices to produce the same effects? Are they not superfluous beings, even supposing they do exist? For all the benefits, consolations, and moral improvements, as likewise all the darkenings and prostrations, bestowed by the Christian religion upon the human soul proceed from this belief and not from the objects of this belief. The case here is no different from that other celebrated case: there were, to be sure, no witches, but the terrible effects of the belief in witches were the same as they would have been if there really had been witches. For all those occasions upon which the Christian expects the direct intervention of a God but does so in vain—because there is no God—his religion is sufficiently inventive in reasons and excuses to pacify him: in this it is certainly an ingenious religion. — Faith has hitherto been unable to move any real mountains, to be sure, even though I know not who asserted it could; but it is able to place mountains where there were none before.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“Christianity is the religion of antiquity grown old, its presupposition is degenerated ancient cultures; on these it could and can act as a balm. In ages in which ears and eyes are ‘filled with mud’, so that they are no longer capable of hearing the voice of reason and philosophy, or of seeing wisdom in bodily form, whether it bear the name of Epictetus or Epicurus: in such ages the cross of martyrdom and the ‘trumpet of the last judgement’ may perhaps still move the peoples to live a decent life. If one thinks of the Rome of Juvenal, that poison-toad with the eyes of Venus, one learns what it means to confront the ‘world’ with a Cross, one comes to respect the quiet Christian community and is grateful that it overran the Graeco-Roman world. When most people were born as though with the souls of slaves and the sensuality of old men, what a blessing it must have been to encounter beings who were more soul than body and seemed to be an actualisation of the Greek conception of the shades of Hades: modest, elusive, benevolent figures living in expectation of a ‘better life’ and thereby become so undemanding, so silently contemptuous, so proudly patient! — This Christianity as the evening-bell of good antiquity, a bell broken and weary yet still sweet-sounding, is a balm to the ears even for him who now wanders through these centuries only as a historian: what must it have been for the men of these centuries themselves! — On the other hand, for youthful, vigorous barbarians Christianity is poison; to implant the teaching of sinfulness and damnation into the heroic, childish and animal soul of the ancient Germans, for example, is nothing other than to poison it; a quite tremendous chemical fermentation and decomposition, a confusion of feelings and judgements, a rank exuberance of every kind of fantasy must have been the outcome, and thus in the longer run a fundamental enfeeblement of such barbarians. — One must, to be sure, ask what, without this enfeeblement, there would have been left to us of Greek culture! of the entire cultural past of the human race! — for the barbarian races untouched by Christianity were capable of doing away with ancient cultures altogether: as, for example, was demonstrated with fearful clarity by the pagan conquerors of Romanized Britain. Christianity was obliged against its will to assist in making the ‘world’ of antiquity immortal. — Here too there still remains another counter-question and the possibility of a counter-reckoning: if it had not been enfeebled by the poison referred to, would one or other of these vigorous peoples, the German possibly, have perhaps been capable of gradually finding a higher culture for themselves, one of their own, a new one? — of which, as things are, mankind has not now the remotest conception? — Thus it is the same here as everywhere: one does not know, to speak the language of Christianity, whether God owes more gratitude to the Devil or the Devil more gratitude to God for everything having turned out as it has.”– Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“To make plans and project designs brings with it many good sensations; and whoever had the strength to be nothing but a forger of plans his whole life long would be a very happy man: but he would occasionally have to take a rest from this activity by carrying out a plan — and then comes the vexation and the sobering up.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (trans. Hollingdale)
“The task of painting the picture of life, however often poets and philosophers may pose it, is nonetheless senseless: even under the hands of the greatest of painter-thinkers all that has ever eventuated is pictures and miniatures out of one life, namely their own–and nothing else is even possible. Something in course of becoming cannot be reflected as a firm and lasting image, as a ‘the’, in something else in course of becoming.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
alice blue twenty is published today. It includes my story, “The Tellings.” Here’s a link to the main site:
http://www.alicebluereview.org/main.html
“The twentieth century, with its scores of millions of supernumerary dead, has been called the age of ideology. And the age of ideology, clearly, was a mere hiatus in the age of religion, which shows little sign of expiry. Since it is no longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally dreadful. It is straightforward—and never mind, for now, about plagues and famines: if God existed, and if he cared for humankind, he would never have given us religion.” – Martin Amis, The Second Plane
“When the socialists show that the division of property among present-day mankind is the outcome of countless acts of injustice and violence, and in summa repudiate any obligation towards something having so unjust a foundation, they are seeing only one aspect of the matter. The entire past of the old culture was erected upon force, slavery, deception, error; but we, the heirs and inheritors of all these past things, cannot decree our own abolition and may not wish away a single part of them. The disposition to injustice inhabits the souls of the non-possessors too, they are no better than the possessors and have no moral prerogative over them, for their own ancestors were at some time or other possessors. What is needed is not a forcible redistribution but a gradual transformation of mind: the sense of justice must grow greater in everyone, the instinct for violence weaker.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (trans. Hollingdale)
“I miss the rain. I miss standing beneath the sky and looking up at the moon and stars. I miss the wind. I miss cats and dogs. I miss wearing real clothes, having a real toothbrush, using a real pen, drinking iced tea, eating ice cream, and going for walks.
“I’m tempted to say the thing I miss most is fruit. I haven’t had a piece of fresh fruit in about eight years, and before that I only got it once a year. The prison used to give everyone two apples and two oranges on Christmas, but then they stopped, said it was a ‘threat to security,’ along with tea bags and dental floss. So I haven’t had any in nearly a decade now. They prevent scurvy by giving everyone a cup of watered-down orange juice for breakfast. It doesn’t have much taste, but enough vitamin C to keep your teeth from falling out.
“In the end, it’s not the fruit I miss the most, though if you rolled all the deprivations into one thing, it would be this: I miss being treated like a human being.” – Damien Echols, Life After Death
“Sometimes it’s even more disturbing to see the cases of mental retardation on Death Row than it is to see the insane. I say this because there is often something very childlike in the actions of the retarded. To see a retarded person being led to execution is an abomination. It’s something that should never happen, yet it does. Sometimes even innocent retarded people are executed, which is a double travesty. There was a guy here who had the IQ of a child, and it was common knowledge that he did not commit the crime he was convicted of. He was here because he was taking the blame for something his brother had done. He was eventually executed in his brother’s place. The guy was blatantly and obviously retarded, and he lived on a diet of potato chips, candy bars, and cake. He acquired the money for these things from a nun who came to see him every so often. Sometimes his mother would come see him, and since they had nothing to talk about they would both put their heads down on the table and sleep. It was heartbreaking to witness. I don’t recall ever seeing him take a shower. He just sat silently in his cell until the day he was killed.” — Damien Echols, Life After Death
“For many people in prison their worst fear is going insane, because once you do all hope is lost. You will be locked up not only within these walls, but also within your own rapidly degenerating mind. There is no help, and you wouldn’t even be able to work on your own case in order to get your death sentence converted. You would sit in a cell playing with feces and screaming at phantoms that no one else could see. This is not the place you want to lose your marbles.” — Damien Echols, Life After Death