"Nihilism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... morality to be a mere means to power. Needless to say that verses 9, 10, 11, and 12 refer to the Greeks, the Persians, the Jews, and the Germans respectively. In the penultimate verse he makes known his discovery concerning the root of modern Nihilism and indifference,—i.e., that modern man has no goal, no aim, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Hence it is that the Emperor and his Government are so insistent on the doctrine of Heaven-granted sovereignty, so ready to support more or less autocratic monarchies in other parts of the world, and so sensitive to popular movements like Anarchism and Nihilism in Russia, or the always-smouldering Polish agitation and the propaganda of the Social Democracy in Germany. When King Frederick William IV said to his assembled generals at Potsdam a week after the "March Days," "Never have ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... in conclusion, that if the testimony of consciousness is not accepted in all its integrity, we are necessarily involved in the Nihilism of Hume and Fichte; the phenomena of mind and matter are, on analysis, resolved into an absolute nothingness—"a play of phantasms in ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... solicitude, taxed to the utmost his fertile brain; and that was the rising and wide-spreading doctrines of Socialism,—which was to Germany what Nihilism is to Russia and Fenianism was to Ireland; based on discontent, unbelief, and desperate schemes of unpractical reform, leading to the assassination even of emperors themselves. How to deal with this terrible foe to all governments, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... intimidate them; nothing intimidates them. Educated men, learned men even, are to be found among Nihilists; these go further, in that they are men of action. The movement is, properly speaking, a derivative from Nihilism—though they are only known indirectly, and by hearsay, for they never advertise their doings in the papers. They go straight to the point. For them, it is not a question of showing that Pushkin is stupid, or that Russia must be torn in pieces. No; but if they have ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Germany is either strong enough to refuse to pay or ruined beyond the possibility of paying? Meanwhile Russia, reduced to a scrap of fish and a pint of cabbage soup a day, has fallen into the hands of rulers who perceive that Materialist Communism is at all events more effective than Materialist Nihilism, and are attempting to move in an intelligent and ordered manner, practising a very strenuous Intentional Selection of workers as fitter to survive than idlers; whilst the Western Powers are drifting and colliding and running on the ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... time, patience, perseverance and self-sacrifice we will overcome them. Nothing succeeds like success. The establishment of a work of that kind is the work of years and even of centuries. There must be some day a start, a foundation to build on. The policy of nihilism leads nowhere. The frequentation of our State universities would indefinitely postpone all efforts for the Catholic ideal, and be a surrender of the whole situation. But let us not be carried away with the modern fallacy of materialistic grandeur. Spacious and beautiful ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... the hydra-headed monstrosity. Marat, Danton and Robespiere concentrated in their intense natures the venom, the hate, and the desperation of the people—a more terrible triumvirate than the celebrated one which colored the Tiber with the patrician blood of Rome. The Nihilism of Russia is the outgrowth of monopoly in land and the consequent enslavement of the people by the aristocracy, beginning with the autocrat upon his throne. England has reached a transition period. The pressure of her population has become so intense, that the great producing classes can ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... be said by a modern critic, deals with morals, and we are discussing art and criticism. That the objection is conceivable is precisely the measure of our decadence. For the vital centre of our ethics is also the vital centre of our art. Moral nihilism inevitably involves an aesthetic nihilism, which can be obscured only temporarily by an insistence upon technical perfection as in itself a supreme good. Neither the art of religion nor the religion of art is an adequate statement of the ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... elements of the two worst societies in Europe are concentrating in New York, and that unless rigorous measures are taken to keep them down, America will harbor graver dangers than any it has yet known. Russian nihilism, Polish anarchism, German socialism may join hands with the Sicilian Mafia and the Neapolitan Camorra to institute a criminal organization such as the world has never seen before. There are enough ignorant immigrants to yield to a wave of ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Kantian premises; idealism is the unavoidable result of the Critique of Reason and foretold by; it as the Messiah was foretold by John the Baptist. And by the evil fruit we know the evil root: the idealistic theory is philosophical nihilism, for it denies the reality of the external world, as the materialism of Spinoza denies a transcendent God and the freedom of the will. Reality slips away from both these systems—they are the only consistent ones there are—material ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... this little band of youths by day and by night, sleeping and waking. He had fallen upon the very centre of the first students' brotherhood: an alliance formed a few years before, during that unique revolution of Russian youth which resulted in the birth of Nihilism. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... madonnina, the protectress of the passage—a quaint figure of the Virgin with the red spark of a lamp at her feet. The lamps appear for the most part to have gone out, and the images doubtless have been sold for bric-a- brac. The ferrymen, for aught I know, are converted to Nihilism—a faith consistent happily with a good stroke of business. One of the figures has been left, however—the Madonnetta which gives its name to a traghetto near the Rialto. But this sweet survivor is a carven stone inserted ages ago in the corner of an old palace and doubtless difficult ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... cannot gain a world-spirit by a sudden destruction of our patriotism. We will never usher in tranquillity with a crash. The nihilism of Tolstoy would plunge us into lawlessness and anarchy, for the chief element of patriotism we must keep. "What is that element?" you ask. It is the willingness of the individual to sacrifice his welfare ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... divine against another, "to observe"—as Jenkin put it—"how the gladiators in dispute murder the cause between them, while they so fiercely cut and wound one another." For Collins such observation was more than oratorical artifice; it was one of the dogmas of his near-nihilism. He commented once to Des Maizeaux upon the flurry of critics who replied to his statement of necessitarianism in the ...
— A Discourse Concerning Ridicule and Irony in Writing (1729) • Anthony Collins
... effect of laws forbidding it—as the pig that breaks into the kitchen garden is created by the dog that chews its ear! The Anarchist favors abolition of all law and frequently belongs to an organization that secures his allegiance by solemn oaths and dreadful penalties. "Nihilism" is a name given by Turgenieff to the general body of Russian discontent which finds expression in antagonizing authority and killing authorities. Constructive politics would seem, as yet, to be a cut above ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... morning since 1861 to hear of thrones overturned, armies vanquished, dynasties obliterated; to hear of great men gone by sudden and cruel death: but the anger and despair when Booth's cruel work was known; the shuddering horror over Garfield's taking off; the amazement when the hand of Nihilism laid an emperor dead; the overthrow of Austria in a single day; the extinction of the Bonapartes—these things were heard and digested with something like repose compared to the bewildering outbreak that met the destruction ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... without any visible or traceable reason, the spirit of Russian Nihilism began to flame again, and with ...
— The Boy Nihilist - or, Young America in Russia • Allan Arnold
... the welter of ecclesiastical and professional humbug which saves the face of the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry. Even atheists reproach me with infidelity and anarchists with nihilism because I cannot endure their moral tirades. And yet, instead of exclaiming "Send this inconceivable Satanist to the stake," the respectable newspapers pith me by announcing "another book by this ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... lasting for several years. The Poles, too, felt the oppressive hand of Pobiedonostzev. The latter was mastered by the Slavophil philosophy that the revolutionary unrest in Russia was traceable to the diversity of races, languages, and religions. He believed that Nihilism, Anarchism, and Socialism flourished because the people were cosmopolitan rather than nationalistic in experience and feeling, and that peace and stability could come only from the persistent and vigorous development of the three principles ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... seen no more in England. Some six months afterwards the Marquess of Montalva and Signor Rulli, his secretary, were both murdered in their rooms at the Hotel Escurial at Madrid. The crime was ascribed to Nihilism, and the murderers were never arrested. Inspector Baynes visited us at Baker Street with a printed description of the dark face of the secretary, and of the masterful features, the magnetic black eyes, and the tufted brows of his master. ...
— The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge • Arthur Conan Doyle
... compose my feetur's without any darn nihilism machine back on me," said the captain; which he straightway did in a manner ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... remains let a man live happily; let him not go without butter (literally ghee) even though he run into debt,' etc.[1] Of sterner stuff was the man who invented a new religion as a solace for sorrow and a refuge from the nihilism ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... of the party call it Nihilism," replied the Frenchman, with an inimitable gesture, conveying the fact that he was not the man to ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... he said: "politics, perhaps, nihilism, or perhaps again—love. There was one fact, or coincidence, worth noting: when Lady Beltham came home from the Transvaal after the war, during which, by the way, she did splendid work among the sick and wounded, she sailed by the same ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... by correspondents on the subject of the proper use of the familiar words lady and woman, and of the titles of married women, induces the reflection that the "woman" question is one which rivals in universal interest those of Nihilism, Irish rebellion, and the future presidency. It is not, however, of ultimate importance to a woman what she is called, as arose by any other name would smell as sweet, but it is of importance to those who speak of her, because by ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... born in the house he has himself built. On the other hand, we have seen that the idealism which represents being or existence as consisting of perception is utterly incompatible with materialism of any sort or kind, unless, indeed, with a materialistic nihilism wherein would be no room for a solitary molecule, still less for any molecular structure, and least of all for that motion of molecular structures into which consistent materialists are logically bound to attempt to resolve all natural ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... him an indescribable air which no mechanic could have acquired in the practice of his handicraft however dishonestly exercised: the air common to men who live on the vices, the follies, or the baser fears of mankind; the air of moral nihilism common to keepers of gambling hells and disorderly houses; to private detectives and inquiry agents; to drink sellers and, I should say, to the sellers of invigorating electric belts and to the inventors ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... speculations as these towards universal Skepticism, or even absolute Nihilism, with the exception only of certain fleeting phenomena of Consciousness, is too apparent to require any formal proof; and it must be equally evident that they contradict some of the most universal and deeply-rooted convictions of the human mind. The ultimate ground of every system of Idealism ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... become that "they are threatening to make clothes-screens of us." Hence "the beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes ... till they become transparent." The logical tendency of such teaching may seem to be towards utter nihilism. But that tendency is checked and qualified by the strong conservative element which is everywhere prominent in Carlyle's thought. Upon the absolute need of "clothes" the stress is again and again ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... dramatists. Another departure from the American atmosphere is in the case of Steele Mackaye; here in preference to "Hazel Kirke," I have selected "Paul Kauvar," farthest away from American life, inasmuch as it deals with Nihilism, but written at a time when there was a Nihilistic fever in New ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists - 1765-1819 • Various |
