- Great things require either silence or speaking with grandeur: with grandeur, meaning cynicism and innocence.
- What I am narrating is the story of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come otherwise: the arrival of nihilism. This story can still be narrated even now: because the necessity itself is at work here. This future already speaks with a hundred signs, this fate proclaims itself everywhere; for this music of the future, all ears are already strained. Our entire European culture seems to have been moving for some time now towards a catastrophe, with an agonizing tension that grows from decade to decade: restless, violent, hurriedly: like a river that wants to reach its end, that does not consider, that fears to consider. [...]

(from the preface of the edition)