- Great things require either silence about them or speaking with grandeur: with grandeur, that is, with cynicism and innocence.

- What I am narrating is the story of the next two centuries. I describe what is coming, what can no longer come in any other way: the advent of nihilism. This story can still be told even now: for the necessity itself is at work here.

This future is already speaking with a hundred signs, this fate declares itself everywhere; for this music of the future, all ears are already attuned. The entire European culture seems to have been moving toward a destruction for some time now, with a torturous intensity that grows from decade to decade: restless, violent, hurried: like a river that wants to reach the end, that does not reflect, that is afraid to reflect.

[Excerpt from the foreword text]