Michael Ratnam’s Reviews > Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ > Status Update

38. For war trains men to be free.

What in sooth is freedom? Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves. It is to preserve the distance which separates us from other men.
To grow more indifferent to hardship, to severity, to privation, and even to life itself.
The Free Man is a Warrior !

"Equality," a certain definite process of making everybody uniform, which only finds its expression in the theory of equal rights, is essentially bound up with a declining culture: the chasm between man and man, class and class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be one's self, and to distinguish one's self—that, in fact, which I call the pathos of distance is proper to all strong ages.

The Martial Elements of our soul celebrate their saturnalia in tragedy.
He who is used to suffering, he who looks out for suffering, the heroic man , extols his existence by means of tragedy,— to him alone does the tragic artist offer this cup of the sweetest cruelty.

“Beauty in itself “ is simply a word , it’s not even a concept. In the beautiful, man postulates himself as the standard of perfection; in exceptional cases he worships himself as that standard.

17.
The most intellectual men, provided they are also the most courageous, experience the most excruciating tragedies: but on that very account they honour life, because it confronts them with its most formidable antagonism !!!

But to attack the passions of life at their roots means attacking life itself !!