Most Nihilistic Quotes & Sayings

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory. — Emil Cioran

nihilistic - but — Laura Thalassa

What is at stake is civilization and humanity, nothing less. The idea that everything is permitted, as Nietzsche put it, rests on the premise of nihilism and has nihilistic implications. I will not pretend that the case against nihilism and for civilization is an easy one to make. We are here confronting the most fundamental of philosophical questions, on the deepest levels. In short, the matter of pornography and obscenity is not a trivial one, and only superficial minds can take a bland and untroubled view of it. — Irving Kristol

There is no religion and no philosophy that can give us a comprehensive answer to the whole of our problems, and the abandonment and isolation of the individual who is given no answer, or only inadequate answers, to his question lead to a situation in which more and more cheap, obvious solutions and answers are sought and provided. As, everywhere and in all departments of life, there are contradictory schools and parties, and an equal number of contradictory answers, one of the most frequent reactions is that modern man ceases to ask questions and takes refuge in a conception that considers only the most obvious, superficial aspects, and becomes skeptical, nihilistic, and egocentric. Or, alternatively, he tries to solve all his problems by plunging headlong into a collective situation and a collective conviction, and seeks to redeem himself in this way. — Erich Neumann

I don't find R.E.M. to be nihilistic. There is a constant undertone of joyous optimism. I'm not going to kill myself to Patti Smith or R.E.M. — Michael Stipe

Reactionary 'sheeple' are often more attractive than, ego-driven, nihilistic, phoney,love-fearing,master-race-belief-system-victim-collectors. Fine lines there — Elizabeth Lucye Robillard

Purely historical thought is nihilistic; it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history. — Albert Camus

If you don't believe what other people believe, then they'll accuse you of being nihilistic. — Chuck Palahniuk

The new soft totalitarianism that is advancing on the left wants to have a state religion It is an atheist, nihilistic religion - but it is a religion that is obligatory for all. — Rocco Buttiglione

You can look at Bad Religion, and, really, almost everything I've ever done was an exercise in creativity. I've always had a desire to challenge and question authority, and that's where the fire inside comes from. I challenged authority out of a desire to make things better, not to be nihilistic about it. — Greg Graffin

We talk often about being in a media-saturated society, and we are surrounded by image streams. But it's nihilistic. There's a real randomness to all of it. — Cynthia Daignault

The GOP's thirst for confrontation and crisis is symptomatic of a destructive and nihilistic streak that has overtaken our political system. When one party repudiates the whole concept of compromise, it is inevitable that the government will lurch from one crisis to another. — Mike Lofgren

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

Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes - affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism - the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response. — Victor Davis Hanson

I personally don't live a nihilistic life, I don't have any use for it. — Tommy Lee Jones

Why should a great and powerful nation like the United States allow its relationship with more than a billion Muslims around the world to be defined by the narrow hatred and nihilistic actions of an exceptionally small minority of Muslims? — John O. Brennan

Drugs are nihilistic: they undermine all values and radically overturn all our ideas about good and evil, what is just and what is unjust, what is permitted and what is forbidden. — Octavio Paz

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

The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority. — Nikolai Berdyaev

The Internet carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic, nihilistic. — David Bowie

There should be pluralism - the concept of many religions, many truths. But we must also be careful not to become nihilistic. — Dalai Lama

The rather difficult antagonists towards the Church consist not nearly of the cruel and heartless, nihilistic intellectuals who hate God and humanity, but the well-meaning spirits who for the most part lack an understanding of the Spirit. — Criss Jami

Nihilistic passion, adding to
falsehood and injustice, destroys in its fury its original demands and thus deprives rebellion of its most
cogent reasons. It kills in the fond conviction that this world is dedicated to death. The consequence of
rebellion, on the contrary, is to refuse to legitimize murder because rebellion, in principle, is a protest
against death. — Albert Camus

The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others — Iain Banks

Those who ignore or belittle karmic cause and result are followers of the nihilist heretics. Those who base their confidence only upon the view of emptiness will plunge lower and lower toward the extreme view of nihilism. Those who catapult into this negative direction will never find freedom from the lower states of existence and will be far removed from the higher realms. They say that doctrines emphasizing conventional meanings such as cause and result, compassion, and meritorious accumulations will not bring buddhahood, whereas the uncontrived definitive meaning that resembles the sky is what the great yogis must meditate upon. Among nihilistic views, that is the epitome; and among lower paths, that is the lowest of all. How amazing to claim that, by blocking the cause, a result can be accomplished. — Longchen Rabjam

There's something nihilistic about not having children — Lionel Shriver

Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion which dominate a large part of our intellectual history. It demonstrates how the rebel who takes to action is tempted to succumb, if he forgets his origins, to the most absolute conformity. And so it explains the twentieth century. Lautreamont, who is usually hailed as the bard of pure rebellion, on the contrary proclaims the advent of the taste for intellectual servitude which flourishes in the contemporary world. — Albert Camus

Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. — Bret Easton Ellis

Psychotherapy would not only reflect a nihilistic philosophy but also, even though unwillingly and unwittingly, transmit to the patient what is actually a caricature rather than a true picture of man. First — Viktor E. Frankl

Socialism is nihilistic, in the henceforth precise sense that Nietzsche confers on the word. A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists. — Albert Camus

In theory, multiculturalism is something we should all celebrate; unfortunately, in practice, multiculturalism means multi-morality ... The only antidote to such nihilistic thinking is ethical monotheism, the belief in one universal code of ethics. Differing cultures glorify humanity, but differing moralities destroy it. We must teach what Professor Viktor Frankl concluded after surviving Auschwitz: There are only two races of human beings, the decent and the indecent. That is how the world is divided: not between rich and poor, men and women, North and South, black and white, the powerful and the powerless, or any other nonmoral division that too many contemporary liberals have been advocating. — Dennis Prager

My view of writing "Coldest Girl in Coldtown" was to take every single thing that I loved from every vampire book I had ever read and dump it into one book
everything I like
trying to evoke some of the decadence ... Vampires are a high-class monster: They want to dress up. They want to drink a lot of absinthe, or force their victims to drink a lot of absinthe. They have big parties and have elegant rituals. I think that's a thing we associate with vampires
they are the royalty of our monsters. We expect them to be rich, we expect them to be well-dressed. I wanted to have some of that be true because I like it, and have some of it not be true because it's kind of weird.
I wanted to put in the idea of infection, which I was really interested in and which was a big feature of the vampire books I read growing up. And, the fear and desire for infection
the way in which our urge towards loving vampires is nihilistic. Our fear of them is our survival instincts kicking in. — Holly Black

I am as sure as I am of the fact of Christ's reign, that a comprehensive and centralised system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief and of anti-social nihilistic ethics, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen. — Archibald Alexander Hodge

Why don't I like crowds? I suppose the worst possible thing I could say is that I don't like people, and that crowds are just collections of people. That seems like a very nihilistic way to look at the world. — Chuck Klosterman

If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.
I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, 'of Blood and Soil.' I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers. — Viktor E. Frankl

At what point do we admit that the NFL's true economic function is to channel our desire for athletic heroism into an engine of nihilistic greed? — Steve Almond

Black Power is a nihilistic philosophy born out of the conviction that the Negro can't win ... the view that American society is so hopelessly corrupt and enmeshed in evil that there is no possibility of salvation from within. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Hakeem: A wise man once said that suffering produces perseverance, character; and character, hope.
Andre: Since when did spouting masochism make one wise? And the sacraments of a bitter existence? Who deemed that a vaunted prize? Nihilistic philosophy only births more pain. It's fruitless to espouse folly, repackage it as wisdom, and spew it in a wise man's name. — Booker T. Mattison

The radical hermeneutic of suspicion that characterizes all of post-modernity is essentially nihilistic, denying the very possibility of creative or healing love. In the cross and resurrection of Jesus we find the answer: the God who made the world is revealed in terms of a self-giving love that no hermeneutic of suspicion can ever touch, in a Self that found itself by giving itself away, in a Story that was never manipulative but always healing and recreating, and in a Reality that can truly be known, indeed to know which is to discover a new dimension of knowledge, the dimension of loving and being loved. — N. T. Wright

As a piece of writing, The Elementary Particles feels like a bad, self-conscious pastiche of Camus, Foucault and Bret Easton Ellis. And as a philosophical tract, it evinces a fiercely nihilistic, anti-humanistic vision built upon gross generalizations and ridiculously phony logic. It is a deeply repugnant read. — Michiko Kakutani

Good parenting, from my perspective, is like building a three-foot retaining wall against a four-foot wave. The kids have to make up that extra foot. That wave wants to drag them into an undertow where sound judgment is suspended, where the valueless, uncaring, and ultimately nihilistic cool reigns. — Greg Gutfeld

I wouldn't encourage any kid to become an Elfquest junkie, or any other kind of junkie. Proportion is what we're talking about. We were just talking about that earlier. Proportion in all ways, in storytelling; any story that has an ax to grind is going to burn itself eventually, like the nihilistic comics that Richard was talking about earlier. — Cherie Wilkerson