"Define woman"

“Is pessimism necessarily the sign of decline, of decay, of failure, of exhausted and weakened instincts?—as was the case with the Indians, as is, to all appearance, the case with us ‘modern’ men and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual predilection for what is hard, awful, evil, problematical in existence, owing to well-being, to exuberant health, to fullness of existence? Is there perhaps suffering in overfullness itself? A seductive fortitude with the keenest of glances, which yearns for the terrible, as for the enemy, the worthy enemy, with whom it may try its strength? from whom it is willing to learn what ‘fear’ is? What means tragic myth to the Greeks of the best, strongest, bravest era? And the prodigious phenomenon of the Dionysian? And that which was born thereof, tragedy?—And again: that of which tragedy died, the Socratism of morality, the dialectics, contentedness and cheerfulness of the theoretical man—indeed? might not this very Socratism be a sign of decline, of weariness, of disease, of anarchically disintegrating instincts? And the ‘Hellenic cheerfulness’ of the later Hellenism merely a glowing sunset? The Epicurean will counter to pessimism merely a precaution of the sufferer?”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy ([1886 preface:] An Attempt at Self-Criticism. §1)

“It is as an individualist that I wish to defend the cause of organization! It is impossible to demand that anarchism cannot allow organization by reason of its principles. Not even the most dyed-in-the-wool individualist condemns the association of individuals outright.

Saying, as sometimes is said, either Stirner or Kropotkin, thereby opposing these two thinkers, is wrong. Kropotkin and Stirner cannot be opposed against each other: they expounded the same idea from different points of view. That is all. And the proof that Max Stirner was not the crazed individualist that he is made out to be is that he pronounced himself in favour of “organization”. He even dedicated a whole chapter to the association of egoists.

As our organization has no executive power it will not run contrary to our principles. In the workers’ unions we defend the economic interests of the workers. As for the rest, we must be a distinct group and create organizations on a libertarian basis.”


— Karel Vohryzek,
Speech delivered at the second International Anarchist Congress (1907)

Leftist anti-intellectualism

Importance of philosophy/theory

— Emma Goldman,
The Failure of Christianity

Relevance of Nietzsche's philosophy for revolutionary (anti-)politics

“Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.”

— Henry David Thoreau, Journals (1847)

Light Yagami's reactionary views on crime

Capitalism and Black people

“…I labored to express, in Kantian and Schopenhauerian formulæ, strange and new valuations, which ran fundamentally counter to the spirit of Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as to their taste! What, forsooth, were Schopenhauer's views on tragedy? ‘What gives’—he says in Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [World as Will and Representation], II. 495—‘to all tragedy that singular swing towards elevation, is the awakening of the knowledge that the world, that life, cannot satisfy us thoroughly, and consequently is not worthy of our attachment. In this consists the tragic spirit: it therefore leads to resignation.’ Oh, how differently Dionysus spoke to me! Oh how far from me then was just this entire resignationism!”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (An Attempt at Self-Criticism. §6)

Anti-natalist vs Nietzschad

“The human being is something only as my quality (property) like masculinity or femininity. The ancients found the ideal in one's being male in the full sense; their virtue is virtus and aretē, i.e., manliness. What is one supposed to think of a woman who only wanted to be a complete ‘woman’? That is not given to all of them, and some would set themselves an unattainable goal in this. She is, however, female in any case, by nature; femininity is her quality, and she doesn't need ‘true femininity’. I am human, just like the earth is a planet. As ridiculous as it would be to set the earth the task of being a ‘correct planet’, it is just as ridiculous to burden me with the calling to be a ‘correct human being’.”

— Max Stirner

“Fascism — despite empty and contrary appearances — is something far too ephemeral and impotent to prevent the free, unbridled course of rebel thought that overflows and expands, impetuously bursting beyond every barrier, and furiously spreads beyond every limit — as a powerful, animating, driving force — drawing behind its gigantic steps the vigorous and titanic action of hard human muscle.
Fascism is impotent, because it is brute force.
It is matter without spirit.
It is body without mind.
It is night without dawn!”

— Renzo Novatore, Black Flags (VII)

“Fascism is an epileptic child of the spiritual ‘no’ that is brutalized by striving — vainly — toward a vulgar material ‘yes.’”

— Renzo Novatore, Black Flags (VII)

“The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.”

— Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Introduction)

Marx on religion

Fascist "jokes"

“How comes an intelligent and well-informed man ever to feel the need of believing in this [religious] mystery?

Nothing is more natural than that the belief in God, the creator, regulator, judge, master, curser, savior, and benefactor of the world, should still prevail among the people, especially in the rural districts, where it is more widespread than among the proletariat of the cities. The people, unfortunately, are still very ignorant, and are kept in ignorance by the systematic efforts of all the governments, who consider this ignorance, not without good reason, as one of the essential conditions of their own power. Weighted down by their daily labor, deprived of leisure, of intellectual intercourse, of reading, in short of all the means and a good portion of the stimulants that develop thought in men, the people generally accept religious traditions without criticism and in a lump. These traditions surround them from infancy in all the situations of life, and artificially sustained in their minds by a multitude of official poisoners of all sorts, priests and laymen, are transformed therein into a sort of mental and moral habit, too often more powerful even than their natural good sense.

There is another reason which explains and in some sort justifies the absurd beliefs of the people—namely, the wretched situation to which they find themselves fatally condemned by the economic organization of society in the most civilized countries of Europe. Reduced, intellectually and morally as well as materially, to the minimum of human existence, confined in their life like a prisoner in his prison, without horizon, without outlet, without even a future if we believe the economists, the people would have the singularly narrow souls and blunted instincts of the bourgeois if they did not feel a desire to escape; but of escape there are but three methods—two chimerical and a third real. The first two are the dram-shop and the church, debauchery of the body or debauchery of the mind; the third is social revolution. Hence I conclude this last will be much more potent than all the theological propagandism of the freethinkers to destroy to their last vestige the religious beliefs and dissolute habits of the people, beliefs and habits much more intimately connected than is generally supposed. In substituting for the at once illusory and brutal enjoyments of bodily and spiritual licentiousness the enjoyments, as refined as they are real, of humanity developed in each and all, the social revolution alone will have the power to close at the same time all the dram-shops and all the churches.

Till then the people, taken as a whole, will believe; and, if they have no reason to believe, they will have at least a right.”

— Mikhail Bakunin,
God and the State (chapter 1)

Cynicism as a reactionary force