the best way to dispose of theologians.... This was
precisely the world-historical stupidity of all the persecutors: that
they gave the appearance of honour to the cause they opposed--that they
made it a present of the fascination of martyrdom.... Women are still on
their knees before an error because they have been told that some one
died on the cross for it. _Is the cross, then, an argument?_--But about
all these things there is one, and one only, who has said what has been
needed for thousands of years--_Zarathustra_.

They made signs in blood along the way that they went, and their
folly taught them that the truth is proved by blood.

But blood is the worst of all testimonies to the truth; blood
poisoneth even the purest teaching and turneth it into madness and
hatred in the heart.

And when one goeth through fire for his teaching--what doth that
prove? Verily, it is more when one's teaching cometh out of one's
own burning![26]

[26] The quotations are from "Also sprach Zarathustra" ii, 24: "Of
Priests."

54.

Do not let yourself be deceived: great intellects are sceptical.
Zarathustra is a sceptic. The strength, the _freedom_ which proceed from
intellectual power, from a superabundance of intellectual power,
_manifest_ themselves as scepticism. Men of fixed convictions do not
count when it comes to determining what is fundamental in values and
lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners. They do not see far
enough, they do not see what is _below_ them: whereas a man who would
talk to any purpose about value and non-value must be able to see five
hundred convictions _beneath_ him--and _behind_ him.... A mind that
aspires to great things, and that wills the means thereto, is
necessarily sceptical. Freedom from any sort of conviction _belongs_ to
strength, and to an independent point of view.... That grand passion
which is at once the foundation and the power of a sceptic's existence,
and is both more enlightened and more despotic than he is himself,
drafts the whole of his intellect into its service; it makes him
unscrupulous; it gives him courage to employ unholy means; under certain
circumstances it does not _begrudge_ him even convictions. Conviction as
a means: one may achieve a good deal by means of a conviction. A grand
passion makes use of and uses up convictions; it does not yield to
them--it knows itself to be sovereign.--On the contrary, the need of
fai