Internet History Sourcebooks

Auschwitz God died, and we are alone in a pitiless universe.

God – supposing there is a God – is on the gallows with them, twisting on the rope. It has to be one or the other. God is either dead or in some sense helpless.

And the curious disappearance of satire from our literature is an instance of the fierce things fading for want of any principle to be fierce about. Nietzsche had some natural talent for sarcasm: he could sneer, though he could not laugh; but there is always something bodiless and without weight in his satire, simply because it has not any mass of

To us, as to Milton's devils in Pandemonium, it is darkness that is visible. The human race, according to religion, fell once, and in falling gained knowledge of good and of evil. Now we have fallen a second time, and only the knowledge of evil remains to us.