Nietzsche regarded himself rightly as the successor of Schopenhauer, though he is superior to Schopenhauer in many ways particularly in the consistency and coherence of his doctrine, while Schopenhauer's Oriental ethic of renunciation seems out of harmony with his metaphysic of the omnipotence of will in nature.

Nietzsche's general outlook remained very similar to that of Wagner despite quarreling with him nominally over Parsifal, which Nietzsche thought too Christian and too full of renunciation, and Nietzsche even went so far as to accuse Wagner of being a Jew.

Nietzsche condemns Plato especially on account of his taste for edification, though Russell notes Nietzsche does not quite like condemning him and suggests that perhaps Plato was insincere and only preached virtue as a means of keeping the lower classes in order.

Nietzsche is not a worshipper of the state but rather a passionate individualist and believer in the hero; the misery of a whole nation is of less importance than the suffering of a great individual.

Nietzsche, though a professor, was a literary rather than an academic philosopher and invented no new technical theories in ontology or epistemology; his importance is primarily in ethics and secondarily as an acute historical critic.

Nietzsche's life included an offer of a professorship of philology at Basel in 1869 before he had taken his degree due to his brilliance as a classicist and student of philology, followed by periods of sick leave and eventual retirement in 1879, after which he lived in health resorts in Switzerland, and finally in 1888 he became insane and remained so until his death.

Nietzsche cannot forgive Socrates for his humble origin, calling him a 'pauper' and accusing him of corrupting the noble Athenian youth with a democratic moral bias.

Despite Nietzsche's criticism of the Romantics, his outlook owes much to them and is that of aristocratic anarchism like Byron's, attempting to combine ruthlessness, war, and aristocratic pride on one hand with philosophy, literature, and the arts on the other.

Nietzsche is naturally comparable to Machiavelli in that both have an ethic which aims at power and is deliberately anti-Christian, though Nietzsche is more frank in this respect, while Machiavelli was a man of affairs whose opinions were formed by close contact with public business whereas Nietzsche was a professor, an essentially bookish man and a philosopher in conscious opposition to what appeared to be the dominant political and ethical trends of his time.

What Caesar Borgia was to Machiavelli, Napoleon was to Nietzsche—a great man defeated by petty opponents, and this exemplifies how both philosophers used historical figures as models for their ethical ideals.

Nietzsche's criticism of religions and philosophies is dominated entirely by ethical motives—he admires certain qualities believed to be only possible for an aristocratic minority, and holds that the majority should be only means to the excellence of the few and should not be regarded as having any independent claim to happiness or well-being.

Nietzsche refers habitually to ordinary human beings as 'the bungled and botched' and sees no objection to their suffering if it is necessary for the production of a great man.

The whole importance of the period from 1789 to 1815 is summed up in Napoleon; the revolution made Napoleon possible and that is its justification, and nearly all of the higher hopes of this century are due to Napoleon.

Many modern developments which have a certain connection with Nietzsche's general ethical outlook are contrary to his clearly expressed opinions, and two applications of his ethic deserve notice: first his contempt for women, and second his bitter critique of Christianity.

Nietzsche prefers to express himself paradoxically and with a view to shocking conventional readers by employing the words 'good' and 'evil' with their ordinary connotations and then saying he prefers evil to good, so that his book 'Beyond Good and Evil' really aims at changing the reader's opinion as to what is good and evil but professes to be praising what is evil and decrying what is good.

Buddhism and Christianity are both nihilistic religions in the sense that they deny any ultimate difference of value between one man and another, but Buddhism is much the less objectionable of the two because Christianity is degenerative, full of decaying and excremental elements, and its driving force is the revolt of the bungled and botched, a revolt begun by the Jews and brought into Christianity by holy epileptics like St. Paul who had no honesty.

Nietzsche says it is a mistake to regard it as a duty to aim at the victory of good and the annihilation of evil, calling this view English and typical of John Stuart Mill, for whom he has special virulent contempt because Mill advocates the principle that 'what is right for one man is right for another,' which Nietzsche calls an ignoble hypothesis.

Nietzsche prophesied with a certain glee an era of great wars, and one wonders whether he would have been happy if he had lived to see the fulfillment of his prophecy.

Nietzsche argues it is necessary for higher men to make war upon the masses and resist the democratic tendencies of the age, because everywhere mediocre people are joining hands to make themselves masters, and everything that pampers, softens, and brings the people or women to the front operates in favor of universal suffrage—the dominion of inferior men.

Nietzsche is never tired of railing against women in his pseudo-prophetical book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, saying 'women are not as yet capable of friendship. They are still cats or birds or at best cows. Man shall be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior. All else is folly.' and 'Thou goest to woman, do not forget thy whip.'