If a technician is a sort of a super-ape, the same cannot be said of Plato.
-- Nietzsche
as paraphrased by Walter Kaufmann
in Nietzsche: philosopher psychologist antichrist (World Publishing 1956).
That is, some individuals embody the perfection of a species -- but only rarely.
There is … a certain plausibility to Nietzsche's doctrine, though it is dynamite. He maintains in effect that the gulf separating Plato from the average man is greater than the cleft between the average man and a chimpanzee.
-- Walter Kaufmann
in Nietzsche: philosopher psychologist antichrist (World Publishing 1956).
One beautiful, starry-skied evening, [Hegel and I] stood next to each other at a window, and I, a young man of twenty-two who had just eaten well and had good coffee, enthused about the stars and called them the abode of the blessed. But the master grumbled to himself: "The stars, hum! hum! the stars are only a gleaming leprosy in the sky." For God's sake, I shouted, then there is no happy locality up there to reward virtue after death? But he, staring at me with his pale eyes, said cuttingly: "So you want to get a tip for having nursed your sick mother and for not having poisoned your brother?"
--Heinrich Heine,
as translated by Walter Kaufmann
in Kaufmann's Hegel, a Reinterpretation
(Anchor Books edition, 1966)
