"Friedrich Nietzsche. It's easy to see why his sociopathic ravings would have inspired so many repugnant movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism, the Ayn Randian fringe of libertarianism, and the American alt-Right and neo-Nazi movements today. Less easy to see is why he continues to be a darling of the academic humanities. True, he was a punchy stylist, and, as his apologists note, he extolled the individual superman rather than a master race. But as Bertrand Russell pointed out in A History of Western Philosophy, the intellectual content is slim: it âmight be stated more simply and honestly in the one sentence: âI wish I had lived in the Athens of Pericles or the Florence of the Mediciâ.â"
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Steven Pinker, quoted in "Twenty Questions with Steven Pinker", The Times Literary Supplement (February 19, 2018); on the question "Which author (living or dead) do you think is most overrated?"
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche
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Friedrich Nietzsche
1844 â 1900
deutscher Philologe und Philosoph
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