quote by german philosopher friedrich nietzsche, taken from his 1882 book 'the Gay Science', section 125. the section from which this quote is taken, is as follows:

Where has God gone?" he cried. "I shall tell you. We have killed him - you and I. We are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.

in this section a "madman" tries to tell the other people of his village that god is dead and how hard this makes our lives. In the West we have continued to turn towards science, nature and humanity for what we need rather than God and the supernatural. We have "killed" the God of our ancestors - destroyed the central figure of meaning of Western culture for over nineteen centuries without having managed to find an adequate replacement.

For some, that is not entirely a problem. For others, it is a crisis of the greatest magnitude. The unbelievers in Nietzsche's tale think that seeking God is funny - something to laugh at if not pity. The madman alone realizes just how terrible and frightening is the prospect of killing God - he alone is aware of the true gravity of the situation: we have nothing left and there's no going back.