Nietzsche

The philosophy of Nietzche has suffered through an unfortunate association with the Nazi's, causing many people to overlok the beauty and power of his work.
Much of Nietzche's writing was concerned with the 'will to power', and with what he saw as the stifling and harmful moral codes of his era. He harboured a dep resentment of the overwhelming power of the church, and sought to replace the transpersonal (and therefore impersonal) ideals of religion with a new humanist ideal a vibrant and strong humanity taking their fate into their own hands. He was in many ways a 'naturalist', talking about 'natural morality' and urging us to affirm and celebrate our own nature and to turn against such negative concepts as original sin.
When the Nazi's came to power they set about twisting and manipulating academic works to support their own propoganda, and Nietzche was one of their main victims. In thei hands the will to power, an expression of the individuals dominion over his own life, waws itself transpersonalized and applied to the nation as awhole, becoming the lust for power and dominion over othes. Nietzches humaism became a cold utilitarian materialism, and his naturalism became darwinian in the extreme, focussing singularly on the idea of the survival of the strongest.
Today when most people think of Nietzche their thoughts are indelibly coloured by his twisted and abused version of his philosophy. Bit if one wants to see past this fallacy, and put these maliscious lies to bed once and for all, one needs only to read a few lines of his own words:

Let us consider finally what naivety it is to say 'man ought to be thus and thus!' Reality shows us an enchanting ealth of types, the luxuriance of a prodigal play and change of forms: and doessome pitiful journeyman moralist say at the sifght of it: 'No! man ought to be different'?...He even knows how man ought to be, this bigoted wretch, he paints himself on the wall and says 'ecce homo!'"

Although this this quote was almost certainly written with conservative christianity in mind, it reads today as if it were a specific attack on facism, and the celebration of diversity in this passage is clear.