Zarathustra hates directly.

The priests are not only enemies of Zarathustra, they are enemies of everyone who loves truth, who is in search of truth or who has found the truth. The closer you are to the truth, the more the priest is your enemy. You are disturbing his customers, you are disturbing his business. Religion to him is business.

The Christian churches in America were against me for the simple reason that so many young men and women have come out of their fold. My people don’t belong to any religion. They are religious, and for being religious you don’t have to belong to any religion.

Religiousness is a quality, a fragrance of your consciousness. It has nothing to do with belonging to an organization, following fixed and dead principles, decided by people who have been long, long dead. To look at it differently, in the name of religion the dead are dominating the living: they are dictating to you how you should live. They don’t know anything about the vast changes that have happened since they died.

We are living in a totally different world, in a totally different time and we need every day a spontaneous awareness to respond to reality. And we go on failing because our response is not spontaneous: the reality is new and our response is thousands of years old. Our failure is absolutely certain and that constant failure brings misery in life.

Here are the priests, says Zarathustra to his disciples, and although they are my enemies, pass them by quietly – don’t quarrel with them. They are very efficient in quarreling. They have refined their arguments. They don’t have anything else to do, they only argue. It is better, to…pass them by quietly and with sleeping swords.

Don’t fight with them. Because you are new, you have not yet experienced the truth – that is the problem. They can disturb you, they can lead you astray. You don’t know the truth, nor do they know the truth, but they know the arguments, sophistry. They can convince your minds for anything they want. All priests belong to the category of the sophists.

One of my vice-chancellors was a world-renowned law-expert. He had three offices: one in London, one in New Delhi, one in Peking, and he was running continually from Peking to Delhi, from Delhi to London. He had the biggest cases on his hands – of maharajas, kings, queens – but he was a drunkard. He earned enough money; and when he retired, he donated the whole of the money so that a university could be founded. So he was the founder vice-chancellor of the university that he created.