Nihilism quotes:

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Nihilism is best done by professionals. -- Iggy Pop
Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity. -- Ray Brassier
Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current so-called positive values, to which it remains bound. -- Hannah Arendt
Nihilism is a natural consequence of a culture (or civilization) ruled and regulated by categories that mask manipulation, mastery and domination of peoples and nature. -- Cornel West
I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that's the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up - either religious or social laws - become meaningless. -- Bruce Springsteen
The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism. -- Albert Camus
Nihilism in American comedy came along way before 'The Simpsons.' There was a fairly nihilistic point of view to 'Saturday Night Live,' for instance, back in the beginning, and a lot of really dark comedy had a really anti-sentimental take on life. -- Matt Groening
One cannot be a part-time nihilist. -- Albert Camus
Nihilism, there's really nothing to it. -- Dean Cavanagh
The point is there ain't no point. -- Cormac McCarthy
That is the most extreme form of nihilism: nothingness (the "meaningless") eternally! -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate. -- Albert Camus
The Universe will now be set right. Made over to fit my unique view of what should be. Let Nihilism reign supreme! -- Jim Starlin
Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. -- Victor Hugo
Nihilism: any aim is lacking, any answer to the question "why" is lacking. What does nihilism mean?--that the supreme values devaluate themselves. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Just to say "Well, God is dead" in one breath is to say, in another, that nothing means anything. This is the moment of nihilism. Nihilism is the affirmation of meaninglessness. -- Simon Critchley
The Sexual Revolution is a complete rebellion against authority, natural and supernatural, even against the body and its needs, its natural functions of child bearing. This is not reverence for life, it is a great denial and more resembles Nihilism than the revolution that they think they are furthering. -- Dorothy Day
To think is to say no. -- Emile Chartier
Christian theology is a hair's breadth away from nihilism. -- John Milbank
Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism. -- Susan Sontag
The enemy of liberal capitalism today is not so much socialism as nihilism. -- Irving Kristol
Everything in the world displeases me: but, above all, my displeasure in everything displeases me. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Those who believe in nothing are very, very jealous and angry at those who believe in something. -- Dennis Prager
I believe that we are all, openly or secretly, struggling against one or another kind of nihilism. -- Ellen Willis
If all men lead mechanical, unpoetical lives, this is the real nihilism, the real undoing of the world. -- Reginald Horace Blyth
I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don't think most artists feel their work is meaningless. -- Leonard Baskin
Liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism. -- Alain Badiou
Famously, there's not really anywhere to go after nihilism. It's not progressing toward anything, it's a statement of outrage, however brilliant. -- Alan Moore
My grandfather was a practising Quaker. My father was a nihilist. But nihilism, if you like, is the beginning of faith anyway. -- Sebastian Horsley
There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both. -- Emile M. Cioran
Those are my enemies: they want to overthrow and to construct nothing themselves. They say: "All that is worthless"--and want to create no value themselves. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
Scientists are skeptics. It's unfortunate that the word 'skeptic' has taken on other connotations in the culture involving nihilism and cynicism. Really, in its pure and original meaning, it's just thoughtful inquiry. -- Michael Shermer
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. -- William Shakespeare
Nearly half of the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. This dewy-eyed nihilism provides absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization. Many of these people are lunatics, but they are not the lunatic fringe. -- Sam Harris
What every artist should try to prevent is the car, in which is our civilized life, plunging over the side of the precipice -- the exhibitionist extremist promoter driving the whole bag of tricks into a nihilistic nothingness or zero. -- Wyndham Lewis
Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to power... but also in the fact that it lacks meaning. -- Octavio Paz
National honor is the national property of the highest value. So...uh...I saw the final episode of True Detective season one, and I was left disappointed. All that "Yellow King" bullshit and eerie mythos and nihilism for what, some hackneyed ending about the light beating the dark!? I feel cheated. -- James Monroe
The middle way is a view of life that avoids the extreme of misguided grasping born of believing there is something we can find, or buy, or cling to that will not change. And it avoids the despair and nihilism born from the mistaken belief that nothing matters, that all is meaningless. -- Sharon Salzberg
All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word "no." To "no" there is only one answer and that is "yes." Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread. -- Victor Hugo
what are you looking for? There is no Truth. There's only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and contradiction, Life. Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust,stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. what can you do about it, my poor friend? -- Blaise Cendrars
True genius is creative and makes all from nothing. -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Courage is impulsive; it is narcissism tempered with nihilism. -- Ayelet Waldman
Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism. -- David Foster Wallace
Moral nihilism comes with a price we can now see. -- Torbjorn Tannsjo
Are there any good arguments in defence of moral nihilism? I think not. -- Torbjorn Tannsjo
We should not accept moral nihilism unless we find strong arguments to do so. -- Torbjorn Tannsjo
Science, Nietzsche had warned, is becoming a factory, and the result will be ethical nihilism. -- Rollo May
The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky. -- Anne Rice
I think all true stories are hopeful stories. I don't think there's any room for nihilism. -- John Green
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There are many options for how images can aggregate not to nihilism, but to significance, or to meaning. -- Cynthia Daignault
I don't see any point in nihilism...just as I suppose the nihilist sees no point in everything else. -- John Green
Meaning is malleable: take it out, you get nihilism and despair. Put it in, you get sacredness and something most special. -- Dean Ornish
It is of note that for a long time moral nihilism was a kind of unquestioned default position in analytic moral philosophy. -- Torbjorn Tannsjo
the problem is not suffering itself or oblivion itself but the depraved meaninglessness of these things, the absolutely inhuman nihilism of suffering. -- John Green
Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization. -- Jean Baudrillard
The philosophy that prepares a revolution and the sentiment that underpins the philosophy have, in every case the two pillars of nihilism and mysticism. -- Yukio Mishima
Your drive to produce hard-edged opinions stoked by hostility is likely a sign that you've been brainwashed by the pedestrian influences of pop nihilism. -- Rob Brezsny
The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal. -- Chris Hedges
Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Cynicism was a school in Greece - the Cynics. Diogenes is a famous Cynic. There was a strong belief in nihilism and narcissism. Those are old schools too. -- Oliver Stone
In Nietzsche's view nihilism is not a Weltanschauung that occurs at some time and place or another; it is rather the basic character of what happens in Occidental history. -- Martin Heidegger
... a widespread secularization increasingly descends into a moral, intellectual, and spiritual nihilism that denies not only the One who is the Truth but the very idea of truth itself. -- Charles Colson
If critics and fanboys weren't suckers for simplistic nihilism and high-pressure marketing, Afterlife would be universally acclaimed as a visionary feat, superior to Inception and Avatar on every level. -- Armond White
The struggle against subjectivism was the attempt to avoid the charge of what was then called "idealism" or "nihilism", i.e., that we know nothing more than our own representations. -- Frederick C. Beiser
That is why I have called feminism nihilism. It says that being a woman is nothing definite and that the duty of women is to advance that nothingness as a cause. -- Harvey Mansfield
Suicide attacks are the actions of losers who have nothing left to lose. In this case, Islam serves as a mask, a cover for desperation and nihilism, but not for religion. -- Walter Kasper
It is complete nihilism to propose laying down arms in a world where atom bombs are around. It is very simple: there is no way of achieving peace other than with weapons. -- Karl Popper
The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it. -- Frederick C. Beiser
The weird nihilism that permeates Mellon Collie is extremely relevant to what's going on right now. So many kids are intelligent and articulate, but they don't know what to do with themselves. -- Billy Corgan

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