Hilarious are the weak who think they are good because they have no claws.

Translation and meme reworded the line. Nietzsche’s ‘lahme Tatzen’ are lame (Common: ‘crippled’) paws, and Zarathustra speaks of laughing at the weaklings. Modern English translations still in copyright (probably Walter Kaufmann’s of 1954, not checked against the book) turned the paws into ‘no claws’, and that form is the one quoted on Wikiquote and quote sites, without a translator. The self-improvement creator Jett Franzen (@jettfranzen) posted a further reworded form, ‘Hilarious are the weak who think they are good because they have no claws’, as a Substack note signed ‘- Nietzsche’ on 10 October 2026. The sense survives; the image shifts from a crippled paw (weakness as damage) to a missing claw (weakness as having no weapon).

Zarathustra describes a ‘sublime one’ he saw that day: a solemn penitent of the spirit, back from the forest of knowledge hung with ugly truths, tense like a tiger about to spring, who has not yet learned laughing and beauty. Zarathustra wants him to tire of his sublimity, unlearn his hero-will and stand ‘with relaxed muscles’: ‘When power becometh gracious and descendeth into the visible—I call such condescension, beauty.’ Turning to him, he says that because the man is capable of every evil he wants good from him, and laughs at the weaklings who take their harmlessness for goodness; the chapter ends with the virtue of the pillar, more graceful the higher it rises and harder within.

Goodness counts only in someone who could do harm and does not; the weak who cannot hurt anyone and call that their virtue are merely harmless, and Zarathustra laughs at them.

Shared in self-improvement posts as a call to toughness: make yourself dangerous, grow claws. In the chapter the advice runs the other way. It is said to a man who already has the strength and the menace, and Zarathustra asks him to soften: to unlearn his hero-will, become gracious and beautiful, and make goodness ‘his last self-conquest’. It is also Zarathustra speaking, in a poetic book, not a rule set out by Nietzsche.

• A misquotationHilarious are the weak who think they are good because they have no claws. Substack note by the self-improvement creator Jett Franzen (@jettfranzen), 10 October 2026, signed ‘- Nietzsche’. ‘I have often laughed at’ becomes ‘Hilarious are’; the claws come from modern translations. Where it was seen

• Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, section 13, 1887: The fable of the lambs and the birds of prey: the weak make a merit of their weakness and call the strong evil for being strong.

Kindness, Power, Morality

• The fact is that fewer people are endowed with virtue than wish to be thought to be so. Marcus Tullius Cicero
• There is more sagacity in thy body than in thy best wisdom. (paraphrase)
• Politics is the entertainment branch of industry. Frank Zappa
• One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
• What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche (lists the ‘no claws’ form under Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, chapter 13, no translator named; checked 20 October 2026)
• substack.com/@jettfranzen/note/c-357497735 (Jett Franzen, 10 October 2026, ‘- Nietzsche’)

“Hilarious are the weak who think they are good because they have no claws.” Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche. Not in these words. The idea is in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Part 2, chapter 13 (“The Sublime Ones”, Von den Erhabenen), said by Zarathustra. Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/good-because-they-have-no-claws/ (checked 30 October 2026).

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