The Portable Nietzsche by Friedrich Nietzsche Page A

the mailman, the mediator of impolite incursions. One ought to have one hour in every eight days for receiving letters, and then take a bath.
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    [267]
    There are no educators . As a thinker, one should speak only of self-education. The education of youth by others is either an experiment, conducted on one as yet unknown and unknowable, or a leveling on principle, to make the new character, whatever it may be, conform to the habits and customs that prevail: in both cases, therefore, something unworthy of the thinker—the work of parents and teachers, whom an audaciously honest person has called nos ennemis naturels.
    One day, when in the opinion of the world one has long been educated, one discovers oneself: that is where the task of the thinker begins; now the time has come to invoke his aid—not as an educator but as one who has educated himself and thus has experience.
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    [282]
    The teacher a necessary evil . As few people as possible between the productive spirits and the hungering, receiving spirits! For the intermediaries falsify the nourishment almost automatically when they mediate it: then, as a reward for their mediation, they want too much for themselves, which is thus taken away from the original productive spirits; namely, interest, admiration, time, money, and other things. Hence one should consider the teacher, no less than the shopkeeper, a necessary evil, an evil to be kept as small as possible. If the trouble in the German situation today has perhaps its main reason in the fact that too many people live by trade and want to live well (and thus seek to cut the producer’s prices as much as possible while at the same time raising the prices to the consumer, in order to derive an advantage from the greatest possible damage to both), then one can certainly find a main reason for the spiritual troubles in the surplus of teachers: on their account, one learns so little and so badly.
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    [284]
    The means to real peace . No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one’s own morality and the neighbor’s immorality; for the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as does our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor’s bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane , as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because, as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests.
    And perhaps the great day will come when a people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, “We break the sword,” and will smash its entire military establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the best-armed, out of a height of feeling—that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one’s neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay