The state never has any use for truth as such, but only for truth which is useful to it, more precisely for anything whatever useful to it whether it be truth, half-truth or error.
Dem Staat ist es nie an der Wahrheit gelegen, sondern immer nur an der ihm nützlichen Wahrheit, noch genauer gesagt, überhaupt an allem ihm Nützlichen, sei dies nun Wahrheit, Halbwahrheit oder Irrthum.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, January 11, 2025
Truth and the State
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Untimely Meditations, III: Schopenhauer as Educator, § 8 (tr. R.J. Hollingdale):