Top 46 Nihilistic Quotes
#1. If you take 100 breast-cancer samples, 100 types of cancer have 100 different hallmarks of mutated genes. You could be nihilistic and say, 'Oh, God, we'll never be able to tackle this!' But there are deep, systematic, organizational principles at work in all that diversity.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#2. Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes - affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism - the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response.
Victor Davis Hanson
#3. There should be pluralism - the concept of many religions, many truths. But we must also be careful not to become nihilistic.
Dalai Lama
#4. The punk scene in NY was so gritty and nihilistic & I was like ooh I want to do that
Jessica Hagedorn
#5. I have devoted a whole book (Unweaving the Rainbow) to ultimate meaning, to the poetry of science, and to rebutting, specifically and at length, the charge of nihilistic negativity, so I shall restrain myself here.
Richard Dawkins
#6. Socialism is nihilistic, in the henceforth precise sense that Nietzsche confers on the word. A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists.
Albert Camus
#7. Black Power is a nihilistic philosophy born out of the conviction that the Negro can't win ... the view that American society is so hopelessly corrupt and enmeshed in evil that there is no possibility of salvation from within.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#8. In all of its operations, cinema ceaselessly strives, and fails, to make present a world hopelessly beyond grasp. For this reason cinema is, in its very nature, a nihilistic medium.
John Marmysz
#9. Good parenting, from my perspective, is like building a three-foot retaining wall against a four-foot wave. The kids have to make up that extra foot. That wave wants to drag them into an undertow where sound judgment is suspended, where the valueless, uncaring, and ultimately nihilistic cool reigns.
Greg Gutfeld
#10. Why should a great and powerful nation like the United States allow its relationship with more than a billion Muslims around the world to be defined by the narrow hatred and nihilistic actions of an exceptionally small minority of Muslims?
John O. Brennan
#11. I personally don't live a nihilistic life, I don't have any use for it.
Tommy Lee Jones
#12. There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic.
Richard K. Morgan
#13. Reactionary 'sheeple' are often more attractive than, ego-driven, nihilistic, phoney,love-fearing,master-race-belief-system-victim-collectors. Fine lines there
Elizabeth Lucye Robillard
#14. The GOP's thirst for confrontation and crisis is symptomatic of a destructive and nihilistic streak that has overtaken our political system. When one party repudiates the whole concept of compromise, it is inevitable that the government will lurch from one crisis to another.
Mike Lofgren
#15. Psychotherapy would not only reflect a nihilistic philosophy but also, even though unwillingly and unwittingly, transmit to the patient what is actually a caricature rather than a true picture of man. First
Viktor E. Frankl
#16. If you don't believe what other people believe, then they'll accuse you of being nihilistic.
Chuck Palahniuk
#17. What every artist should try to prevent is the car, in which is our civilized life, plunging over the side of the precipice
the exhibitionist extremist promoter driving the whole bag of tricks into a nihilistic nothingness or zero.
Wyndham Lewis
#18. I have a nihilistic attitude so it's like, the new gay ... it's popular.
Gerard Way
#19. That my philosophy of life is, as far as possible, one of enjoyment. I'm not nihilistic.
Alexander McCall Smith
#20. At what point do we admit that the NFL's true economic function is to channel our desire for athletic heroism into an engine of nihilistic greed?
Steve Almond
#21. Professors and students claim to be on a quest for truth while denying that it exists or that anyone could identify it if it did. Such is the nihilistic atmosphere in major universities around the world.
Dave Hunt
#22. Here's my answer to the very real existential crisis that grips me midway through everything I've ever tried to do: I think stories help us fight the nihilistic urges that constantly threaten to consume us.
John Green
#23. I don't find R.E.M. to be nihilistic. There is a constant undertone of joyous optimism. I'm not going to kill myself to Patti Smith or R.E.M.
Michael Stipe
#24. I think people have always misinterpreted my self-destructive nature as nihilistic, because if you don't care about the world, you can't create art. I am misanthropic and self-loathing, but never nihilistic. And I think I act far worse off-stage than onstage.
Marilyn Manson
#25. It was a uniform that signified that one was a kind of downtown aesthete; not necessarily nihilistic, but a monk in the bohemian order.
David Byrne
#26. Destroying your enemies - even destroying a planet - was understandable. But this wasn't simple destruction. It was annihilation; obliteration. The very fabric of the Force had been shredded. Anyone capable of turning an entire planet into a nihilistic abomination had to be completely mad.
Drew Karpyshyn
#27. Purely historical thought is nihilistic; it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history.
Albert Camus
#28. The Internet carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic, nihilistic.
David Bowie
#29. I'm nihilistic, antagonistic, violent, horrible - but not obliterated, yet. I just refuse to be beaten down. I think it's stubborness that keeps me going.
Lydia Lunch
#30. Each of us knows a few or several young people whose lives have been devastated by cancer. I don't mean to be nihilistic about it, but it is very much an active killer of people now.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
#32. I don't think I can write a book as nihilistic as some of my early ones. They're so bleak. I don't think I would enjoy that as much anymore. You really become fixated on ways out.
Daniel Woodrell
#33. The rather difficult antagonists towards the Church consist not nearly of the cruel and heartless, nihilistic intellectuals who hate God and humanity, but the well-meaning spirits who for the most part lack an understanding of the Spirit.
Criss Jami
#34. Gang shootings - as indiscriminate as they often are - still don't have the nihilistic intent of rampages. Rather, they are rooted in an exceedingly strong sense of group loyalty and revenge, and bystanders sometimes get killed in the process.
Sebastian Junger
#35. The new soft totalitarianism that is advancing on the left wants to have a state religion It is an atheist, nihilistic religion - but it is a religion that is obligatory for all.
Rocco Buttiglione
#36. Black holes are pretty scary when you ponder them. They seem nihilistic, infinitely destructive on an inconceivable scale, notwithstanding the ideas of Hawking radiation.
James Marsh
#37. We talk often about being in a media-saturated society, and we are surrounded by image streams. But it's nihilistic. There's a real randomness to all of it.
Cynthia Daignault
#38. Nihilism in American comedy came along way before 'The Simpsons.' There was a fairly nihilistic point of view to 'Saturday Night Live,' for instance, back in the beginning, and a lot of really dark comedy had a really anti-sentimental take on life.
Matt Groening
#39. There's something nihilistic about not having children
Lionel Shriver
#40. Why don't I like crowds? I suppose the worst possible thing I could say is that I don't like people, and that crowds are just collections of people. That seems like a very nihilistic way to look at the world.
Chuck Klosterman
#41. Drugs are nihilistic: they undermine all values and radically overturn all our ideas about good and evil, what is just and what is unjust, what is permitted and what is forbidden.
Octavio Paz
#42. At one time I was a nihilistic punk with a mohican and a ring in my nose. I think in the course of time I'll find a middle ground, but I also carry that sense of responsibility. I'm in a position to defeat stereotypes.
Michelle Shocked
#43. I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that's the lot. There's no mercy in things. There's not even a Great Beyond. There's nothing.
John Fowles
#44. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead.
Bret Easton Ellis
#45. The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others
Iain Banks
#46. Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and our memory.
Emil Cioran
