Nihilism famous quotes
04-20-2025
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Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism.
-- Alain Badiou -
Famously, there's not really anywhere to go after nihilism. It's not progressing toward anything, it's a statement of outrage, however brilliant.
-- Alan Moore -
Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.
-- Albert Camus -
Continental thinkers have been obsessed with bourgeois man as representing the worst and most contemptible failure of modernity, which must at all costs be overcome. Nihilism in its most palpable sense means that the bourgeois has won, that the future, all foreseeable futures, belong to him, that all heights above him and all depths beneath him are illusory and that life is not worth living on these terms.
-- Allan Bloom -
The gun livens things up. The colonized European comes alive, not to the subject and problem of the violence of our circumstances, but because all armed actions subjects the force of circumstances to the force of events.
-- Andreas Baader -
If critics and fanboys weren't suckers for simplistic nihilism and high-pressure marketing, Afterlife would be universally acclaimed as a visionary feat, superior to Inception and Avatar on every level.
-- Armond White -
Courage is impulsive; it is narcissism tempered with nihilism.
-- Ayelet Waldman -
He was simply someone who floated through our lives and didn't seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he'd shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all.
-- Bret Easton Ellis -
Traditional history appears to be the defacto recognition of every evil deed that failed to be stopped or eliminated.
-- Dagobert D. Runes -
For indeed Christianity was complicit in the death of antiquity, and in the birth of modernity, not because it was an accomplice of the latter, but because it, alone in the history of the West, constituted a rejection of and alternative to nihilism's despair, violence, and idolatry of power; as such, Christianity shattered the imposing and enchanting facade behind which nihilism once hid, and thereby, inadvertently, called it forth into the open.
-- David Bentley Hart -
Meaning is malleable: take it out, you get nihilism and despair. Put it in, you get sacredness and something most special.
-- Dean Ornish -
The Sexual Revolution is a complete rebellion against authority, natural and supernatural, even against the body and its needs, its natural functions of child bearing. This is not reverence for life, it is a great denial and more resembles Nihilism than the revolution that they think they are furthering.
-- Dorothy Day -
I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism.
-- Ellen Willis -
There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.
-- Emile M. Cioran -
Like other lifeforms, we [humans] exist only to replicate ourselves.
-- George Monbiot -
Regimes collapse when people are no longer afraid and think they're no longer alone.
-- Gordon G. Chang -
The precise moment at which a great belief is doomed is easily recognizable; it is the moment when its value begins to be called into question.
-- Gustave Le Bon -
That is why I have called feminism nihilism. It says that being a woman is nothing definite and that the duty of women is to advance that nothingness as a cause.
-- Harvey Mansfield -
The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism.
-- Irving Kristol -
True genius is creative and makes all from nothing.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
The Universe will now be set right. Made over to fit my unique view of what should be. Let Nihilism reign supreme!
-- Jim Starlin -
Christian theology is a hair's breadth away from nihilism.
-- John Milbank -
The contemporary rejection of natural right leads to nihilism — nay, it is identical with nihilism,
-- Leo Strauss -
I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don't think most artists feel their work is meaningless.
-- Leonard Baskin -
Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr. -
Destroy or be destroyed-there is no middle way! Let us then be the destroyers!
-- Mikhail Bakunin -
If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish Him.
-- Mikhail Bakunin -
We must overthrow the material and moral conditions of our present-day life. . . . We must first purify our atmosphere and completely transform the milieu in which we live; for it corrupts our instinct and our will, and constricts our heart and our intelligence
-- Mikhail Bakunin -
The powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on that most rarefied delicacy: impunity.
-- Naomi Klein -
The Stars are setting and the Caravan Starts for the Dawn of Nothing-Oh, make haste!
-- Omar Khayyam -
[R]eligious concepts are parasitic upon moral intuitions.
-- Pascal Boyer -
[S]ince there is no wrong or right, you just reap what you sow.
-- Peter Murphy -
Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.
-- Ray Brassier -
I am against nationalism, and I am against patriotism. They are both the dark side. It is time not simply to redefine a kinder-and-gentler patriotism, but to sweep away the notion and acknowledge it as morally, politically, and intellectually bankrupt. It is time to scrap patriotism.
-- Robert Jensen -
You don't realize all the things you have in this world, much more than you need, and you do much less than you can.
-- Roberto Canessa -
Meanings generating meanings - the process has backed us into a particular corner, a kind of cave, where sunlight seldom enters.
-- Tarthang Tulku -
Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.
-- Victor Hugo -
The laws of history tell us that only when the old is gone can the new take its place.
-- Wei Jingsheng -
There are many options for how images can aggregate not to nihilism, but to significance, or to meaning.
-- Cynthia Daignault -
I rather shared Nietzsche's conception of the kind of individual that an ideal education should be cultivating. 'Authenticity' is not Nietzsche's term, but as used by some existentialists, it nicely captures what Nietzsche admired - the resolve of an individual person to forge his or her own 'table of values', to be emancipated from strait-jacketing conventions, traditions, and ideologies. As embodied in the 'Overman', authenticity is the antidote to 'bad' nihilism.
-- David E. Cooper -
In the doctrine of the world and humankind as 'will to power and nothing else', Heidegger identified not an antidote to nihilism, but the completion of it. For what can be more destructive of truth and value than the doctrine that these are simply the impositions on the world of human exercises of power?
-- David E. Cooper -
If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.
-- Flannery O'Connor -
The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i.e., that we know nothing more than our own representations.
-- Frederick C. Beiser -
The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it.
-- Frederick C. Beiser -
But why should a religious person be interested in a work like Heidegger's that many regard as the epitome of nihilism? For a start, because Heidegger forces us in a way that few philosophers do to really think through the seriousness and all-encompassing nature of our mortality.
-- George Pattison -
Nearly half of the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. This dewy-eyed nihilism provides absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization. Many of these people are lunatics, but they are not the lunatic fringe.
-- Unknown -
My grandfather was a practising Quaker. My father was a nihilist. But nihilism, if you like, is the beginning of faith anyway.
-- Unknown -
The deflation, or flattening out, of values in Modern art does not necessarily indicate an ethical nihilism. Quite the contrary; in opening our eyes to the rejected elements of existence, art may lead us to a more complete and less artificial celebration of the world.
-- Unknown -
Maybe those nihilist philosophers are right; maybe this is all we can expect of the universe, a relentless crushing of life and spirit, because the equilibrium state of the cosmos is death.
-- Unknown -
Scientists are skeptics. It's unfortunate that the word 'skeptic' has taken on other connotations in the culture involving nihilism and cynicism. Really, in its pure and original meaning, it's just thoughtful inquiry.
-- Unknown -
The middle way is a view of life that avoids the extreme of misguided grasping born of believing there is something we can find, or buy, or cling to that will not change. And it avoids the despair and nihilism born from the mistaken belief that nothing matters, that all is meaningless.
-- Unknown -
Nihilism is.not only the belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one shoulder to the plough; one destroys.
-- Unknown -
The philosophy that prepares a revolution and the sentiment that underpins the philosophy have, in every case the two pillars of nihilism and mysticism.
-- Unknown -
Suicide attacks are the actions of losers who have nothing left to lose. In this case, Islam serves as a mask, a cover for desperation and nihilism, but not for religion.
-- Walter Kasper -
Nietzsche saw that ultimately the problem of nihilism is the problem of what to do with time: Why keep investing in the future when there is no longer any transcendental guarantor, a positive end of time as ultimate reconciliation or redemption, ensuring a pay-off for this investment? Nietzsche's solution - his attempted overcoming of nihilism - consists in affirming the senselessness of becoming as such - all becoming, without reservation or discrimination.
-- Ray Brassier -
Just to say "Well, God is dead" in one breath is to say, in another, that nothing means anything. This is the moment of nihilism. Nihilism is the affirmation of meaninglessness.
-- Simon Critchley -
Philosophy isn't programmed into us, and a lot of the forces of our culture steadfastly work against it. Philosophy, for me, is a way of resisting the nihilism of the present by making, creating, affirming. By going on.
-- Simon Critchley -
It is of note that for a long time moral nihilism was a kind of unquestioned default position in analytic moral philosophy.
-- Torbjorn Tannsjo
