Nietzsche Herd Mentality Quotes

A bad conscience is easier to cope with than a bad reputation.

…how ready they themselves are at bottom to make one pay; how they crave to be hangmen. There is among them an abundance of the vengeful disguised as judges, who constantly bear the word “justice” in their mouths like poisonous spittle, always with pursed lips, always ready to spit upon all who are not discontented but go their own way in good spirits…The will of the weak to represent some form of superiority, their instinct for devious paths to tyranny over the healthy – where can it not be discovered, this will to power of the weakest!

No shepherd, and one herd! Everyone wanteth the same; every one is equal: he who hath other sentiments goeth voluntarily into the madhouse.

The morality that would un-self man is the morality of decline par excellence—the fact, "I am declining," transposed into the imperative, "all of you ought to decline"—and not only into the imperative... This only morality that has been taught so far, that of un-selfing, reveals a will to the end; fundamentally, it negates life.

Finally—this is what is most terrible of all—the concept of the good man signifies that one sides with all that is weak, sick, failure, suffering of itself—all that ought to perish: the principle of selection is crossed—an ideal is fabricated from the contradiction against the proud and well-turned-out human being who says Yes, who is sure of the future, who guarantees the future—and he is now called evil.— And all this was believed, as morality! — Ecrasez l'infame!—— [Voltaire's motto: "Crush the infamy!"]

Nietzsche may have been accurately describing the feeble pietism that surrounded him, the saccharine portraits of Jesus from childhood, but he could not have been more incorrect in his analysis that as a religion of the “sick soul,” the preaching of Christ was simply a message of resignation to the powers and principalities. On the contrary, it was the most radical renunciation of the herd mentality that keeps us addicted to the power brokers of this age.

There is among men as in every other animal species an excess of failures, of the sick, degenerating, infirm, who suffer necessarily; the successful cases are, among men, too, always the exception.

Niebuhr was also concerned with man’s place in the immanent world, the world of cultures and societies and political creeds. After the rise of Nazism, he began to focus on the “herd mentality” that Nietzsche had so abhorred. Niebuhr brooded over man’s weakness in the face of conformist human behavior. Also like Nietzsche, he believed that as long as we remain a product of our culture, we cannot rise above its values.