NIHILISM • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Nihilism

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/nˈaɪəlˌɪzəm/ Listen

Nihilism

noun

A revolutionary doctrine that advocates destruction of the social system for its own sake.

The delusion that things (or everything, including the self) do not exist; a sense that everything is unreal. Synonym: nihilistic delusion.

Complete denial of all established authority and institutions.

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Etymology of 'Nihilism'

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"Nihilism" Quotes from Famous Books

... scientific reviews had taken him up as a sort of public Illusionist. Disciples of Charcot explained his scores—though not one had been published—while the neo-moralists gladly denounced him as a follower of the Master Immoralist, a sublimated emotional expression of the ethical nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche. Others, more fanciful, saw in his advent and in his art an attempt to overturn nations, life itself, through the agency of corrupting beauty and by the arousing of illimitable desires. Color and music, sweetness and soft luxuries, declared these modern followers of Ambrose ...

— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... millions, by the extension of the empire in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and by the war with Turkey in the interest of the Slavs in 1877-78, which was ended by the peace of San Stephano, revised by the treaty of Berlin. His later years were clouded with great anxiety, owing to the spread of Nihilism, and he was killed by a bomb thrown at ...

— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... be well that the War has modified our estimate of the value of life; but it is a bad thing for the legitimate drama. And in the case of Fedora the bloody regime of LENIN has so paled our memory of the terrors of Nihilism that SARDOU'S play seems almost further away from us than the tragedy of Agamemnon. In our callous incapacity to be thrilled by the ancient horrors of forty years ago we fall back on the satisfaction ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 10, 1920 • Various

... necessary to point out once again that Anarchism and Nihilism have no more in common than Anarchism and Socialism. As Plechanoff said at the Zurich International Congress: "We (i.e., the Russians) have had to endure every form of persecution, every thinkable misery; but we have been spared ...

— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff

... Europe often added to the burdens and irritation caused by the industrial conditions there. And the immigrant in coming to America brought with him all his grievances, political not less than industrial. He was too ignorant to discriminate; he could only feel. Anarchy and Nihilism, which were his natural reaction against his despotic oppressors in Germany and Russia, he went on cultivating here, where, by the simple process of naturalization, he became politically his own despot in a year ...

— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

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