Democracy

This incessant creation of restrictive laws and regulations, surrounding the pettiest actions of existence with the most complicated formalities, inevitably has for its result the confining within narrower and narrower limits of the sphere in which the citizen may move freely. Victims of the delusion that equality and liberty are the better assured by the multiplication of laws, nations daily consent to put up with trammels increasingly burdensome. They do not accept this legislation with impunity. Accustomed to put up with every yoke, they soon end by desiring servitude, and lose all spontaneousness and energy. They are then no more ...

Thus spake Zarathustra: State, what is that? Well then, now open your ears; now I will tell you my tale about the death of nations. State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. It lies coldly and this lie crawls out from its mouth: “I, the State, I am the People!” Where there is still a real people it does not understand the State and hates it as the evil eye, as sin against morals and rights . . .

The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.

The more equal the conditions of men become, the less strong men individually are, the more easily do they give way to the current of the multitude, and the more difficult is it for them to adhere by themselves to an opinion which the multitude discard. A newspaper represents an association; it may be said to address each of its readers in the name of all the others, and to exert its influence over them in proportion to their individual weakness. The power of the newspaper press must therefore increase as the social conditions and cultural values of men become ...