The inveterate doctrinaires who call themselves free-thinkers have yet another reason for making theoretical, anti-religious propaganda a prerequisite for practical activity. For the most part they are bad revolutionaries, simply vainglorious egotists and cowards. Moreover, by their social position they belong to the educated classes, and they very much cherish the comfort and refined elegance, and the gratification of intellectual vanity, with which the life of those classes is filled. They understand that a popular revolution, by its nature and objective, is crude and unceremonious, that it will not hesitate to destroy the bourgeois world in which they live so well. Therefore, aside from the fact that they have no intention whatsoever of inflicting upon themselves the great inconveniences that accompany honest service to the revolutionary cause, and have no desire to provoke the indignation of their less liberal and audacious but still valued patrons, admirers, friends, and colleagues, with whom they share education, worldly ties, refinement, and material comfort, they simply fear and do not want such a revolution, which would pull them down from their pedestal and suddenly deprive them of all the advantages of their present position.

But they do not want to own up to this, and they feel compelled to shock the bourgeois world with their radicalism and to draw the revolutionary youth, and if possible the people themselves, behind them. How is this to be done? They must shock the bourgeois world but not anger it, and they must attract the revolutionary youth but avoid the revolutionary abyss! There is only one way: to direct all of their pseudo-revolutionary fury against the Lord God. They are so sure of his non-existence that they do not fear his wrath. The authorities are another matter – authorities of any kind, from the tsar to the last policeman! The rich and powerful are another matter, too, from the banker and the tax farmer to the last kulak merchant and landowner! Their wrath might make itself felt all too painfully.

On the strength of such reasoning, they declare relentless war on God, in the most radical fashion rejecting religion in all its forms and manifestations and fulminating against theology, metaphysical fantasies, and all popular superstitions in the name of science – which, of course, they carry in their pockets and sprinkle into all their verbose screeds. At the same time, however, they treat with extraordinary delicacy all the political and social powers of this world, and if, compelled by logic and public opinion, they do allow themselves to reject them, they do it so courteously and mildly that one would have to have a very stern temper to get angry at them, and they invariably leave loopholes and express the hope that those powers can be reformed. Their capacity for hoping and believing in them is so great that they even suppose it possible that our Governing Senate will sooner or later become the organ of popular liberation.

ఆ తప్పూ నేనే... ఈ ఒప్పూ నేనే... తప్పొప్పులు తగలెట్టే నిప్పూ నేనే

ā tappū nēnē... ī oppū nēnē... tappoppulu tagaleṭṭē nippū nēnē

I am the wrong... I am the right... and I am the fire which burns down the wrong and the right

తరలివచ్చినవారి తరువానులు తెరలివాటులయ్యిరేల!
తుకాటనాటివాళి తరువానులు తెరలెదురులయ్యిరేల!

taralivaccinavāri taruvānulu teralivāṭulayyirēla!
tukāṭanāṭivāḷi taruvānulu teraledurulayyirēla!

How have the descendants of (Aryan) immigrants become nationalists?
and how have the descendants of the natives become "anti-nationals"?

The only thing “free” about so-called free time is that it doesn’t cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair.

It is disgraceful to live at the cost of one’s self-respect. Self-respect is the most vital factor in life. Without it man is a mere cipher. To live worthily with self-respect one has to overcome difficulties. It is out of hard and ceaseless struggle alone that one derives strength, confidence and recognition.

There is nothing so precious to man in life as self-respect and basic human rights.

The thing we in India have to think of is this—to remove those social customs and ideals which have generated a want of self-respect and a complete dependence on those above us,—a state of affairs which has been brought about entirely by the domination in India of the caste system, and the blind and lazy habit of relying upon the authority of traditions that are incongruous anachronisms in the present age.

I wanted people to start by respecting themselves: Everything else follows from that.

Everything hitherto called ‘truth’ is recognized as the most harmful, malicious, most subterranean form of the lie; the holy pretext of ‘improving’ mankind as the cunning to suck out life itself and to make it anaemic. Morality as vampirism... He who unmasks morality has therewith unmasked the valuelessness of all values which are or have been believed in; he no longer sees in the most revered, even canonized types of man anything venerable, he sees in them the most fateful kind of abortion, fateful because they exercise fascination...

The concept ‘God’ invented as the antithetical concept to life – everything harmful, poisonous, slanderous, the whole mortal enmity against life brought into one terrible unity! The concept ‘the Beyond’, ‘real world’ invented so as to deprive of value the only world which exists — so as to leave over no goal, no reason, no task for our earthly reality! The concept ‘soul’, ‘spirit’, finally even ‘immortal soul’, invented so as to despise the body, so as to make it sick – ‘holy’ – so as to bring to all the things in life which deserve serious attention, the questions of nutriment, residence, spiritual diet, clealiness, weather, a horrifying frivolity! Instead of health ‘salvation of the soul’ – which is to say a folie circulaire between spasms of atonement and redemption hysteria! The concept ‘sin’ invented together with the instrument of torture which goes with it, the concept of ‘free will’, so as to confuse the instincts, so as to make mistrust of the instincts into second nature! In the concept of the ‘selfless’, of the ‘self-denying’ the actual badge of décadence, being lured by the harmful, no longer being able to discover where one's advantage lies, self-destruction, made the sign of value in general, made ‘duty’, ‘holiness’, the ‘divine’ in man!

A god who died for our sins: redemption through faith; resurrection after death—all these are counterfeits of true Christianity for which that disastrous wrong-headed fellow [Paul] must be held responsible.

The exemplary life consists of love and humility; in a fullness of heart that does not exclude even the lowliest; in a formal repudiation of maintaining one’s rights, of self-defense, of victory in the sense of personal triumph; in faith in blessedness here on earth, in spite of distress, opposition and death; in reconciliation; in the absence of anger; not wanting to be rewarded; not being obliged to anyone; the completest spiritual-intellectual independence; a very proud life beneath the will to a life of poverty and service.

After the church had let itself be deprived of the entire Christian way of life and had quite specifically sanctioned life under the state, that form of life that Jesus had combatted and condemned, it had to find the meaning of Christianity in something else: in faith in unbelievable things, in the ceremonial of prayers, worship, feasts, etc. The concept “sin,” “forgiveness,” “reward”—all quite unimportant and virtually excluded from primitive Christianity—now comes into the foreground.

An appalling mishmash of Greek philosophy and Judaism; asceticism; continual judging and condemning; order of rank, etc.

For the new year. — I'm still alive; I still think: I must still be alive because I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum¹. Today everyone allows himself to express his dearest wish and thoughts: so I, too, want to say what I wish from myself today and what thought first crossed my heart – what thought shall be the reason, warrant, and sweetness of the rest of my life! I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them – thus I will be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati²: let that be my love from now on! I do not want to wage war against ugliness. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation! And, all in all and on the whole: some day I want only to be a Yes-sayer!

Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds, and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live. I took a few steps down that road and stopped; for when I cannot retain my faith in universal man standing over and above my country, when patriotic prejudices overshadow my God, I feel inwardly starved.

Pride of patriotism is not for me. I earnestly hope that I shall find my home anywhere in the world, before I leave it. We have to fight against wrongs, and suffer for the cause of righteousness; but we should have no petty jealousies or quarrels with our neighbours merely because we have different names.