[Democrats and liberals] are unfree and ludicrously superficial, above all in their fundamental inclination to see in the forms of existing society the cause of practically all human failure and misery: which is to stand the truth happily on its head! What with all their might they would like to strive after is the universal green pasture happiness of the herd, with security, safety, comfort and an easier life to all; for their two most oft-recited doctrines and ditties are ‘equality of rights’ and ‘sympathy for all that suffers’ – and suffering itself they take as something to be abolished. (Beyond Good and Evil no. 44)

He whose task and practice it is to explore the soul will avail himself of precisely this art in many forms in order to determine the ultimate value of a soul, the unalterable innate order of rank to which it belongs: he will test it for its instinct of reverence […] The way in which reverence for the Bible has hitherto been generally maintained in Europe is perhaps the best piece of discipline and refinement of manners that Europe owes to Christianity […] There is perhaps nothing about the so-called cultured, the believers in ‘modern ideas’, that arouses so much disgust as their lack of shame, the self-satisfied insolence of eye and hand with which they touch, lick and fumble with everything; and it is possible that more relative nobility of taste and reverential tact is to be discovered today among the people, among the lower orders and especially among peasants, than among the newspaper-reading demi-monde of the spirit, the cultured. (Beyond Good and Evil no. 263)

Has there not been since the time of Copernicus an unbroken progress in the self-belittling of man and his will for belittling himself? Alas, his belief in his dignity, his uniqueness, his irreplaceableness in the scheme of existence, is gone…Since Copernicus man seems to have fallen on to a steep plane — he rolls faster and faster away from the centre— whither? Into nothingness? Into the thrilling sensation of his own nothingness?…All science…nowadays sets out to talk man out of his present opinion of himself, as though that the opinion had been nothing more than a bizarre piece of conceit. You might go as far as to say that science finds its peculiar pride, its peculiar bitter form of stoical ataraxia, in preserving man’s contempt for himself… (Nietzsche Genealogy of Morals Essay 3, section 25, 1887)

Every kind of severity, even severity in justice, begins to trouble the conscience; a stern and lofty nobility and self-responsibility is received almost as an offence and awakens mistrust, the ‘lamb’, even more so the ‘sheep’, is held in higher and higher respect. There comes a point of morbid mellowing and over-tenderness in the history of society at which it takes the side even of him who harms it, the criminal, and does so honestly and wholeheartedly. Punishment: that seems to it somehow unfair. (Beyond Good and Evil no. 201)

I cannot see how somebody who did not at the right time go to a good school can ever make up for this. Such a person does not know himself; he goes through life without having learned to walk, the slack muscles are betrayed by every step […] Under all circumstances what is most desirable is a hard discipline at the right time, at that age when one is proud to see much demanded of one. What differentiates the hard school as the good school from every other is that much is demanded, that it is demanded strictly, that even the good and excellent are demanded as normal, that praise is infrequent, that indulgence is lacking, that reproaches are sharp and objective without regard to talent or origin […] The same discipline makes competent the scholar and the soldier, and strictly speaking there are no competent scholars who do not have within them the instincts of a competent soldier […] What does one learn in a hard school? To obey and to command. (Will to Power, no. 912)

Modern, noisy, time-consuming, proud industriousness has extinguished the religious instincts, so that people no longer have any idea of what religions are about and as it were just register their presence in the world with a kind of dumb amazement […] How much naivety, venerable, childlike and boundlessly stupid naivety there is in the scholar’s belief in his superiority, in the good conscience of his tolerance, in the simple unsuspecting certainty with which his instinct treats the religious man as an inferior and lower type which he himself has grown beyond and above – he the little presumptuous dwarf and man of the mob, the brisk and busy head – and handyman of ‘ideas’, of ‘modern ideas’! (Beyond Good and Evil no. 58)

In the three or four civilized countries of Europe by a few centuries of education one can make women into anything one wants, even into men: not, of course, in the sexual sense but in every other sense. Through this regimen they will one day have acquired all the masculine strengths and virtues, although by the same token they will have had to take on all their weakness and vices […] But how shall we endure the intermediate stage, which may last a few centuries, during which the female follies and injustices, their primeval inheritance, still assert themselves over what has been newly learned and acquired? This will be the age when the actual masculine affect will be anger: anger at the fact that all the arts and sciences have been deluged und suffocated by an unheard-of dilettantism, philosophy talked to death by mind-bewildering babble, politics more fantastic and partisan than ever, society in full dissolution because the custodians of traditional morality have become ludicrous to themselves and are striving in every way to stand outside morality. For if women possessed their greatest power in custom, for what, when they have abandoned custom, will they have to grasp to again obtain a comparable abundance of power? (Human, All Too Human no. 425)