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Last Man Quotes

Browse 4 quotes about Last Man.

Last Man Quotes

“We are the Overcomers, the Overmen, not the Last Men. The Last Men want a petty, trivial, comfortable world without any suffering. Fuck ‘em! The task is not to eliminate suffering, but to sublimate it. All people who accomplish anything great impose tremendous discipline, suffering, and hardship on themselves. They deny themselves an easy, hedonistic life. They train hard, study hard, try hard, make tremendous sacrifices. They’re certainly not in the Last Man game of removing suffering from their life. They don’t want to end suffering. They want to use suffering to develop.”

“Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself’, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.”