In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man.

This aphorism comes from Nietzsche’s middle-period work *Human, All Too Human* (1878), a book composed in the wake of his break with Wagner and his turn toward a more “free‑spirit” style of psychological and cultural critique. The remark appears among short, deliberately provocative observations on morality, the passions, and relations between the sexes—topics Nietzsche treats as arenas where inherited moral ideals and social conventions mask more elemental drives. In this setting, the line functions less as a sociological claim than as a pointed, polemical entry in a sequence of aphorisms meant to unsettle complacent assumptions about “civilization,” virtue, and gendered moral stereotypes.

The line suggests that the passions of love and revenge can strip away social polish and expose a more primal, ruthless intensity. Nietzsche’s “barbarous” is less an anthropological claim than a polemical psychological one: he implies that where women are socially constrained in many arenas, the arenas of erotic attachment and personal retaliation may become sites of concentrated force, cunning, and extremity. The aphorism also functions as a critique of moralizing narratives that assign fixed virtues to genders. Read critically, it exemplifies Nietzsche’s tendency to generalize from stylized observations and to provoke readers into examining how power and desire operate beneath moral language.

1) “In revenge and in love, woman is more barbarous than man.”
2) “In revenge and in love woman is more barbaric than man.”