The Portable Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche

adored as the supreme goddess. And now—horrors!—it is precisely the “worker” who has become dangerous. “Dangerous individuals are swarming all around. And behind them, the danger of dangers: the individual.
    Â 
    [179]
    As little state as possible . All political and economic arrangements are not worth it, that precisely the most gifted spirits should be permitted, or even obliged, to manage them: such a waste of spirit is really worse than an extremity. These are and remain fields of work for the lesser heads, and other than lesser heads should not be at the service of this workshop: it were better to let the machine go to pieces again. . . . At such a price, one pays far too dearly for the “general security”; and what is most insane, one also produces the very opposite of the general security, as our dear century is undertaking to prove—as if it had never been proved before. To make society secure against thieves and fireproof and infinitely comfortable for every trade and activity, and to transform the state into Providence in the good and bad sense—these are low, mediocre, and not at all indispensable goals, for which one should not strive with the highest means and instruments anywhere in existence, the means one ought to reserve for the highest and rarest ends. Our time, however much it talks of economy, is a squanderer: it squanders what is most precious, the spirit.
    Â 
    [193]
    Esprit and morality . The Germans, who know the secret of being boring with spirit, knowledge, and feeling, and who have accustomed themselves to feel boredom as moral, fear the French esprit lest it prick out the eyes of morality—fear and yet are charmed, like the little bird before the rattlesnake. Of the famous Germans, perhaps none had more esprit than Hegel; but for all that, he too feared it with a great German fear, which created his peculiar bad style. The essence of this style is that a core is wrapped around, and wrapped around again and again, until it scarcely peeks out, bashful and curious—as “young women look through their veils,” to quote the old woman-hater, Aeschylus; that core, however, is a witty, often pert perception about the most spiritual things, a delicate and daring connection of words, such as belongs in the company of thinkers, as a side dish of science—but in those wrappings it presents itself as abstruse science itself, and by all means as the most highly moral boredom. Thus the Germans had their permissible form of esprit, and they enjoyed it with such extravagant delight that Schopenhauer’s good, very good, intelligence froze at the mere sight: all his life he stormed against the spectacle offered him by the Germans, but never could explain it to himself.
    Â 
    [197]
    The hostility of the Germans to the Enlightenment. Let us reconsider the contribution to culture in general made by the Germans of the first half of this century with their spiritual labor, and let us first take the German philosophers. They have reverted to the first and most ancient stage of speculation, for they have been satisfied with concepts instead of explanations, like the thinkers of dreamy ages; they revived a prescientific kind of philosophy. Second, there are the German historians and romantics: their general effort was directed toward gaining a place of honor for more ancient, primitive feelings, and especially Christianity, the folk soul, folk sagas, folk language, medievalism, Oriental aesthetics, Indianism. Third, there are the natural scientists: they fought against the spirit of Newton and Voltaire and sought, like Goethe and Schopenhauer, to restore the idea of a divine or devilish nature and its entirely ethical and symbolical significance.
    The whole great tendency of the Germans ran counter to the Enlightenment, and to the revolution of society which, by a crude misunderstanding, was considered its consequence: piety toward everything still in