For years, social media users have claimed the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said: "If you crush a cockroach, you're a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you're a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria."
In September 2023, for example, a Facebook user posted (archived) the claim in meme format in a post that had received around 99,000 reactions, 3,400 comments, and 31,000 shares at the time of this writing.
Just over a year later, an X post (archived) made on Oct. 2, 2024, featured the same quote in a different meme format. That post had received around 44,000 likes and 382 reposts.
(X user @QuoteNietzsche)
The quote also appeared in numerous other posts on Facebook (archived), on X (archived), and on Reddit (archived), as well as on Goodreads (archived). It was also part of a list of Nietzsche quotes included in a blog post (archived) on the website of the library of West Virginia's Fairmont State University, with no mention of which of Nietzsche's works it purportedly came from.
Some internet users expressed doubt about the accuracy of the quote's attribution. For example, responding to the October 2024 X post, one individual wrote (archived): "Nietzsche never said this," with a clapping hands emoji between each word.
Nietzsche 👏 never 👏 said 👏 this 👏
— Goose (@NonkantianGoose) October 3, 2024
Quoting the same X post, another user wrote (archived): "it's a great quote, but there's zero evidence Nietzsche said this, literal misinformation posted by some bot probably lol."
These internet users were right to be skeptical: There is no credible evidence to suggest that Nietzsche ever said or wrote the passage in question.
In an attempt to verify the attribution, we searched for it — unsuccessfully — in each of the 18 volumes of "The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche." We consulted this work through The Online Books Page, a directory of public-domain and otherwise freely accessible online books hosted by the University of Pennsylvania's libraries.
To account for the possibility of different translations, we also searched each of the 18 volumes for instances of individual words mentioned in the quote. A search for "butterfly" found a total of 15 results in Nietzsche's writings, none of which matched or resembled the substance of the quote when read in context. Searches for "cockroach" and "roach," on the other hand, returned zero results in any of the volumes.
The Quote's Origin
If Nietzsche didn't originate the quote, who did?
Some internet users have attributed the words to other historical figures such as the Sufi mystic poet Rumi (archived) or to Arthur Schopenhauer (archived), another 19th-century German philosopher. However, we found no credible evidence linking the quote to either individual.
The WikiQuote page for Friedrich Nietzsche, which had the quote in its "Misattributed" section, pointed toward another attribution. In a note under the alleged quote, a WikiQuote editor wrote:
Sometimes attributed to Nietzsche, the quote appears in none of his works, the likely origin is a June 2015 post on the reddit "showerthoughts" forum, where it was not attributed to Nietzsche. There are no earlier examples on reddit and also none on google books.
The quote did indeed feature — with no attribution — in a June 2015 post (archived) on r/showerthoughts. However, a comment (archived) on that post linked to an even earlier example of the quote in a December 2012 X post (archived).
If you crush a cockroach, you're a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you're a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria.
— IG (@samalmightysam) December 11, 2012
This post was, in fact, the earliest example of the quote we identified anywhere on the internet. We've reached out to the X user who created the post for confirmation that he was the original author of the quote, and will update this story if and when we get a response.
Either way, there was no credible evidence to support the claim that the quote originated from Friedrich Nietzsche. As such, we have rated the quote as misattributed.
We've previously investigated the attributions of other quotes about insects, including whether David Attenborough ever said: "If you collect 100 black ants and 100 red ants and put them in a glass jar nothing will happen, but if you take the jar, shake it violently and leave it on the table, the ants will start killing each other," as well as whether Albert Einstein ever said: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left."