Daniel Dennett on Friedrich Nietzsche

“Friedrich Nietzsche saw—through the mists of his contempt for all things English—an even more cosmic message in Darwin: God is dead. If Nietzsche is the father of existentialism, then perhaps Darwin deserves the title of grandfather.”

“Nietzsche's Just So Stories are terrific (old-style and new-style). They are a mixture of brilliant and crazy, sublime and ignoble, devastatingly acute history and untrammeled fantasy. If Darwin's imagination was to some degree handicapped by his English mercantile heritage, Nietzsche's was even more handicapped by his German intellectual heritage, but those biographical facts (whatever they are) have no bearing on the current value of the memes whose birth each attended so brilliantly.”