Friedrich Nietzsche
The German philosopher who declared God dead, attacked conventional morality, and went mad before anyone took him seriously.
Origin
Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a young classics professor at Basel who quit due to illness and spent the next decade writing increasingly aphoristic, increasingly furious books — Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals. He collapsed in a Turin street in 1889 (the story goes: weeping over a beaten horse), spent his last decade in silent madness, and was canonized after his death by his sister, who edited him into a proto-Nazi mascot he would have despised. The serious recovery of his work happened after WWII.
Modern usage
Quoted constantly, almost always out of context. 'God is dead' ([[god-is-dead]]) is the canonical line. 'What does not kill me makes me stronger' is the gym-poster version. 'Nietzschean' usually means unsentimental, willful, anti-establishment — sometimes profound, often used to dress up resentment as philosophy.
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