The Portable Nietzsche, pg 608

“The ‘kingdom of heaven’ is a state of the heart – not something that is to come ‘above the earth’ or ‘after death.’ The whole concept of natural death is lacking in the evangel: death is no bridge, no transition; it is lacking because it belongs to a wholly different, merely apparent world, useful only insofar as it furnishes signs. The ‘hour of death’ is no Christian concept – an ‘hour,’ time, physical life and its crises do not even exist for the teacher of the ‘glad tidings.’ The ‘kingdom of God’ is nothing that one expects; it has no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it will not come in ‘a thousand years’ – it is an experience of the heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere.”

To Have or to Be?

“Marx wrote (in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts) that ‘free conscious activity’ (i.e., human activity) is ‘the species character of man.’ Labor, for him, represents human activity, and human activity is life. Capital, on the other hand, represents for Marx the amassed, the past, and in the last analysis, the dead (Grundrisse). One cannot fully understand the affective charge which the struggle between capital and labor had for Marx unless one considers that for him it was the fight between aliveness and deadness, the present versus the past, people versus things, being versus having. For Marx the question was: Who should rule whom – should life rule the dead, or the dead rule life? Socialism, for him, represented a society in which life had won over the dead.

“Marx’s whole critique of capitalism and his vision of socialism are rooted in the concept that human self-activity is paralyzed in the capitalist system and that the goal is to restore full humanity by restoring activity in all spheres of life.”

The Quiet American

“I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit.”

The Brothers Karamazov

“‘Let me tell you something, mother,’ the Elder said. ‘Once upon a time, a great saint of antiquity saw in the temple one such as you, a mother who was also weeping for her infant, her only child, whom the Lord also had summoned. ‘Do you not know,’ the saint said to her, ‘how daring such infants are before the throne of God? There are none more daring than they in all the Kingdom of Heaven: ‘You gave us life, O Lord,’ they say to God, ‘yet no sooner had we beheld it than You took it away from us again.’ And with such daring do they ask and demand that the Lord immediately accords them the rank of angels. And therefore,’ said the holy man, ‘do you too rejoice, O woman, and weep not, for your infant is now with the Lord in the assembly of His angels.’”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 221

“Stability and indestructibility, the true goals of centroversion, have their mythological prototype in the conquest of death, in man’s defenses against its power, for death is the primorial symbol of the decay and dissolution of the personality.  Primitive man’s refusal to recognize death as a natural occurrence, the immortalization of the king among the ancient Egyptians, ancestor worship, and the belief in the immortality of the soul in the great world-religions – all these are but different expressions of the same fundamental tendency in man to experience himself as imperishable and indestructible.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 115

“Ego consciousness not only brings a sense of loneliness; it also introduces suffering, toil, trouble, evil, sickness, and death into man’s life as soon as these are perceived by an ego.  By discovering itself, the lonely ego simultaneously perceives the negative and relates to it, so that it at once establishes a connection between these two facts, taking its own genesis as guilt, and suffering, sickness, and death as condign punishment.  The whole life feeling of primitive man is haunted by the negative influences all around him, and at the same time by the consciousness that he is to blame for everything negative that befalls.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness, pg 113

“The transition from the uroboros to the adolescent stage was characterized by the emergence of fear and the death feeling, because the ego, not yet invested with full authority, felt the supremacy of the uroboros as an overwhelming danger.”

Meditations

“The man whose heart is palpitating for fame after death does not reflect that out of all those who remember him every one will himself soon be dead also, and in course of time the next generation after that, until in the end, after flaring and sinking by turns, the final spark of memory is quenched.  Furthermore, even supposing that those who remember you were never to die at all, nor their memories to die either, yet what is that to you?  Clearly, in your grave, nothing; and even in your lifetime, what is the good of praise – unless maybe to subserve some lesser design?  Surely, then, you are making an inopportune rejection of what Nature has given you today, if all your mind is set on what men will say of you tomorrow.”

Meditations

“Remind yourself constantly of all the physicians, now dead, who used to knit their brows over their ailing patients; of all the astrologers who so solemnly predicted their clients’ doom; the philosophers who expatiated so endlessly on death or immortality; the great commanders who slew their thousands; the despots who wielded powers of life and death with such terrible arrogance, as if themselves were gods who could never die; the whole cities which have perished completely, Helice, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and others without number.  After that, recall one by one each of your own acquaintances; how one buried another, only to be laid low himself and buried in turn by a third, and all in so brief a space of time.  Observe, in short, how transient and trivial is all mortal life; yesterday a drop of semen, tomorrow a handful of spice or ashes.  Spend, therefore, these fleeting moments on earth as Nature would have you spend them, and then go to your rest with a good grace, as an olive falls in its season, with a blessing for the earth that bore it and a thanksgiving to the tree that gave it life.”

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?

“It is important to realize that certain genocidal aspects of human nature have remained unchanged during the past five thousand years regardless of any genetic evolution which has taken place during this period; they also remain immune to environmental and social influences.  One of these is the prejudice against darker people which has persisted unchanged since the dawn of recorded time in ancient Egypt, whose ‘miserable people of Cush’ are still represented in oppressed Negro populations throughout the world.  The other is ‘search and destroy’ warfare.  For example:

“’234 Viet Cong ambushed and killed’ and ’237 villagers slaughtered in Viet Nam’ (Both from US Army reports, 1969).

“Compare: ’800 of their soldiers by my arms I destroyed; their populace in the flames I burned; their boys, their maidens, I dishonored.  1000 of their warriors’ corpses on a hill I piled up.  On the first of May, I killed 800 of their fighting men, I burned their many houses, their boys and maidens I dishonored,’ etc (From the Annals of Assur-Nasir-Pal, Cloumn II, about 870 B.C.E.).

“Thus for at least 2800 years there have been willing and eager corpse-counters.  The good guys end up as ‘casualties;’ the bad guys as ‘bodies,’ ‘dead,’ or ‘corpses.’”