This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily understands me-I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops-and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him.... Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philologist, philosopher, cultural critic,