Nihilism Quotes

“Many great thinkers are said to be misanthropes, usually because they did not embrace all people around them as the greatest thing since sliced bread (which is actually a terrible thing: it massively reduces flavor if you keep it more than a day, which the shipping process by very nature imposes). This enables us to write off their opinions as “subjective,” with an airy wave of our hand and the all-knowing proclamation, “You know he was a misanthrope” or “Her misanthropy kept her from knowing the good in humanity.” This dismissive outlook is designed to protect the meek among us, who might be offended by the knowledge that recreational heroin use is actually a somewhat illogical outlook (to avoid absolute categories, we say “for most,” since for some people, dying of heroin addiction is the best solution). Misanthropy goes into the file with evil, terrorists, hackers, Nazis, pot smokers and Montana cabin-dwellers – people who have rejected society, and thus cannot be trusted.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“To all you defenders of democracy, I'd like one answer: all of us acknowledge that there are hordes of stupid people out there. Why do you want to give them political power?”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“Truth doesn't exist. Truth is our perception of what does exist; our assessment of it. You will have to find the truth that's appropriate to your own life and also exists in reality. Note that I did not say "your own truth." Individualism is the greatest con job ever. You are the product of those who came before you in your bloodline, and the factors of your life. You do not exist separately from the world and you cannot escape this state. Furthermore, there's no point. Pursue truth as it is evident to you.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“Choices make us feel alive because in it we are exercising the capacity of life. [...] We feel alive when we encounter a choice and make a good one. We feel dead when we shirk from these choices, even if we're "comfortable" with our warm homes, cars, video games, pornography and serving-size packaged prefabricated foods.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“Social Darwinism, or the idea that those who are the best and smartest earn the most money, has two holes: first, not all intelligent people opt to chase the money wagon and second, most morons are greedy, and many of them succeed through luck or persistence.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“Few people mind a dumb person who is humble and follows orders well, but dumb people who agitate for change that benefits dumb people quickly destroy any civilization.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“To recognize the nature of nihilism, we see feces and death as the "dark side" of the mouth, and through that recognize life beyond the human perspective. Humans fear things that disturb them personally, and then assign to those things a universal status, like a monkey trying to convince a tribe that his enemy is its enemy. Escaping this is the essence of nihilism, or a reduction of all value except the inherent and holistic. "Disgusting" is not important; the function of the world and the human body is. Function, measures in real-world changes and results, is more important than sensations or moral judgements,feelings and emotions.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“Marriage is the commitment to make a lifetime of a love, as one will most probably be creating new life forms merged of the parents. Love is what happens when one finds someone else one respects enough to wish literally union in the form of one's irreplaceable time and possibly spawn. If you look at the process of breeding, it's quite romantic: We work, so let Another be made of Us.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“Crowdists love “competition” of a fixed nature, where a single vector determines the winner. They do not like real life competition, including evolution, as it assesses the individual as a whole and does not simply rank individuals by ability. For this reason crowds love both sports events and free market capitalism, as each allow people to gain power according to a linear system. The more time you put into the system with the sole goal of making profit, excluding all else, the more likely it is that you can get wealth – and it can happen to anyone! That is the promise that makes crowds flock to these ideas. It is like the dream of being a rock star, or a baseball hero, or a billionaire: what makes it attractive is the idea that anyone can do it, if they simply devote themselves to a linear path of ascension – one that is controlled by the whims of the crowd. The crowd decides who is a baseball hero, or what to buy and thus who to make rich. Control without control.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“You cannot "educate" people; education does not improve moral character and congenital intelligence. You can show them things, and if they find meaning in them, they'll adapt to their own lifestyle and purpose. It's like eating: you take in food, break it down, and it becomes part of you where you can use it. The rest goes into the carrot patch, and might feed something else.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“Democracy is the most popular political system because it demands nearly nothing from the citizen and gives them the ability to pretend to be anything.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“While Christians divide sex into a linear good/bad, it makes more sense to divide it into realistic and non realistic, and people who are either obsessed with avoiding sex, or with cheapening it, are both insane.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“Recognition that popularity of an idea has no bearing on its fitness for our collective survival frees us from the tyranny of the crowd, and let us have leaders again, who instead of finding out what is popular and espousing it, find out what is practical and pursue it. Nihilism ends the society of illusions by shattering the power of the Crowd.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“To reject decision-making, as a whole, is passivity, not nihilism [...]. Nihilism is a rejection of any belief system that is exclusively human, e.g. does not have a paired structure in nature. That means that unless we see reason to believe in the Gods, we do not believe.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“Inherent morality is like tying a hand behind our backs. Outcomes and methods exist in the moment, and may cause us personal fear, but what we must look at is the long-term consequences of our actions. Our human instinct is to demand inherent morality from fear for ourselves, but this shows us is that what we want to consider "inherent" to the world is inherent to a different globe entirely - the human head.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“Fatalism and selfishness will be eternally popular because they're the same thing. Don't reach out into the world and challenge yourself; you're fine just the way you are! Don't strive for anything. Don't grow. Just be, and you're EQUAL and we're all happy. If people aren't convinced, hide behind the idea that nothing ever changes and there's no point doing anything, except living for your own comfort and convenience.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“Forgiveness is giving up on the treacle of what has failed and moving towards that which is more ideal. It takes us from a negative logic of detesting something, to a space of emptiness, from which we can reconnect with creative logic and instead of acting out our fears of the negative, reach toward what may be beautiful.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“Most of our failures in love involve self-deception. The other was not all that excited about the relationship, but we projected our enthusiasm onto the other and charged ahead. Or the other was hopeful, but we were cynical and attributed that same motivation to the other. We can ignore the needs of an other because they are not impulses we feel; we can ignore warning signs because they do not fit into our vision of what should be.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“{...], reality is painful, so people invent justifications and use them to supplant measurement of reality. We could use the old cliché of an ostrich hiding its head in the sand, but only if there's a television down there, dramatizing the sadness. It is an inversion of art: instead of singing the beautiful, we find praises for the ugly and disguise it as beauty, because we have lost belief in beauty. As good nihilists, we note that this loss of beauty is vested more in belief than in beauty. We have made beauty contingent upon so many moral justifications that it is socially taboo to note beauty without somehow tying it to the plight of the disadvantaged.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“Democracy is to government as television is to life. It's a sick pornography of existence, distilling the wide range of experience into a few pre-prepared options, with people engaging in the process more to feel important about themselves than to get anything done. When it's time to really find a survey about something unimportant, like what color we paint the city hall, by all means take a vote - who cares what the outcomes is.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity