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I just recently started reading Nietzsche. I picked up The Portable Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann. It has a lot of his notes and letters, and essential excerpts from his well-known essays. I haven't gotten too far, reading it chronologically, except that I did already read "The Anti-Christ" and his "madman letters," the ones he wrote after his mental breakdown. Damn, The Anti-Christ was a brutal attack on Christians, and fucking awesomely written at that. The guy says stuff I think today! And I never really read Nietzsche before. Examples:
"There are days when I am afflicted with a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy—contempt of man. And to leave no doubt concerning what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am fatefully contemporaneous. The man of today—I suffocate from his unclean breath. My attitude to the past, like that of all lovers of knowledge, is one of great tolerance, that is, magnanimous self-mastery: with gloomy caution I go through the madhouse world of whole millennia, whether it be called "Christianity," "Christian faith," or "Christian church"—I am careful not to hold mankind responsible for its mental disorders. But my feeling changes, breaks out, as soon as I enter modern times, our time. Our time knows better."
Preach it Nietzsche! This was in 1887, I believe! How about this next one...times sure don't change a whole lot:
"A religion like Christianity, which does not have contact with reality at any point, which crumbles as soon as reality is conceded its rights at even a single point, must naturally be mortally hostile toward the "wisdom of this world," which means science. It will applaud all means with which the discipline of the spirit, purity and severity in the spirit's matters of conscience, the noble coolness and freedom of the spirit, can be poisoned, slandered, brought into disrepute. "Faith" as an imperative is the veto against science—in practice, the lie at any price."
You can't help but love someone who opens up a work with this:
"In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die."
