Oswald Spengler
@Daily_Spengler
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Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler. German historian. Philosopher of history. Polymath. Political writer. Author of Der Untergang des Abendlandes. 1880–1936.
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“Capitalism” and “Socialism” are both of an age, intimately related, produced by the same outlook and burdened with the same tendencies. Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.
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Democracy has become a weapon of moneyed interests. It uses the media to create the illusion that there is consent from the governed. The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers.
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Happy birthday to Oswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried Spengler! Today, 29 May, is the 141st anniversary of the birth of Herr Spengler, who was born in the summer of 1880 in the small town of Blankenburg, Germany. And now rests in Nordfriedhof München.
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«Spengler was always at war with himself: he admired toughness, but he was soft to the core of his being; he championed a community of true believers; but he himself led a life of isolation and loneliness;
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The decay of the white family, the inevitable outcome of megalopolitan existence, is spreading, and it is devouring the “race” of nations. The meaning of man and wife, the will to perpetuity, is being lost. People live for themselves alone, not for future generations.
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Spengler, posing for a photograph, while wrathfully having a cigar, 5 years before his death in his bed, quietly.
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In the early morning of 8 May 1936 Spengler died of a heart attack at his Munich apartment. His sisters buried him quietly, with the request that there be no expressions of sympathy.
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Democracy has become a weapon of moneyed interests. It uses the media to create the illusion that there is consent from the governed. The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers.
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Political life is equally meaningless. Parliamentarism provides a talking shop that obscures the basic political reality—the triumph of money. Before the power of financial speculation everything gives way: constitutionalism, democracy, even socialism.
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1/ The Russians are by no means a people like the Germans and the English. Like the Germanic tribes of the Carolingian age they contain within themselves the potentialities of many future peoples. “Russianism” is the promise of a future culture as the evening shadows grow longer
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It was we and not the Hellenes or the men of the high Renaissance that prized and sought out high mountaintops for the sake of the limitless range of vision that they afford. This is a Faustian craving—to be alone with endless space.
#Spengler
Evola, in the Alps with some unidentified friends. He is the one to the extreme right, seems to be looking towards the boundless horizon.
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1/ There can be no doubt: a new Russian people are in the process of becoming. Shaken and threatened to their very soul by a frightful destiny, forced to an inner resistance, it will in time become firm and come to bloom.
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France became involved in a revolution, not because “the people” opposed absolutism—which no longer existed—nor because of the poverty and indebtedness of the country—for these were far greater elsewhere—but because authority was in process of dissolution.
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All things organic are dying in the grip of organisation. An artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural. Civilisation has itself become a machine that does, or tries to do, everything in mechanical fashion.
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Men are tired to disgust of money-economy. They hope for salvation from somewhere or other, for some real thing of honour and chivalry, of inward nobility, of unselfishness and duty.
#Spengler
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The age is mighty, but all the more diminutive are the people in it. They can no longer bear tragedy, either on the stage or in real life. They crave happy endings of insipid novels, so miserable and weary are they.
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1/ It is the spiritual weakness of the “Late” man of the higher civilizations, who lives in his cities cut off from the peasant and the soil and thereby from the natural experiencing of destiny, time and death.
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World history is a tragic fate. Its scenes are battlefields of insoluble mental conflicts. Its legacy is corpses and ruins. It is stupid and cowardly to try to cover this up like the literati. Not their agony, but their greatness should be understood. No complaints, but pride!
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When whole peoples become pacifistic it is a symptom of senility. Strong and unspent races are not pacifistic.
#Spengler
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Through the economic history of every Culture there runs a desperate conflict waged by the soil-rooted tradition of a race, by its soul, against the spirit of money.
#Spengler
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Since Napoleonic times liberalism has captured the minds of our educated classes. Pseudo-intellectuals (Nietzsche’s “cultural philistines”) and ivory-tower scholars, shut off from the real world by a barrier of abstract knowledge, have been its staunchest defenders.
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Spengler was buried holding copies of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Goethe’s Faust. His grave is marked with a block of polished black granite, chosen by Paul Reusch, inscribed in white with “Spengler”: the monument austere, solid, enduring.
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For us citizens of the Western world, religion is finished. In our urban souls what was once true religiosity has long since been intellectualized to ‘problematics.” The Church reached its fulfilment at the Council of Trent. Puritanism has turned into capitalism, & Pietism is now
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For the Age has itself become vulgar, and most people have no idea to what extent they are themselves tainted. The bad manners of all parliaments, the general tendency to connive at a rather shady business transaction if it promises to bring in money without work,
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Long, long ago the country bore the country-town & nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably & incessantly demanding & devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies & dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.
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A power can be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and no power that can confront money is left but this one. Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood.
#Spengler
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Ideas that have become blood demand blood. War is the eternal pattern of higher human existence, and countries exist for war’s sake; they are signs of readiness for war. And even if a tired and blood-drained humanity desired to do away with war,
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We think only in horsepower now; we cannot look at a waterfall without mentally turning it into electric power; we cannot survey a countryside full of pasturing cattle without thinking of its exploitation as a source of meat supply;
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Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them. What is needed is not a pure race, but a strong one, which has a nation within it. This manifests itself above all in self-evident elemental fecundity, in an abundance of children,
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“To move from barbarism to civilisation while pursuing a dream, then to decline and die away as soon as that dream has lost its strength—such is the cycle of a people's life.”—Gustave Le Bon.
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1/ It must be concluded that democracy and plutocracy are the same thing under the two aspects of wish and actuality, theory and practice, knowing and doing.
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In preparation for the World War the press of whole countries was brought financially under the command of London and Paris, and the peoples belonging to them reduced to an unqualified intellectual slavery.
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The nation as society, once the organic web of families, threatens to dissolve, from the city outwards, into a sum of private atoms, of which each is intent on extracting from his own and other lives the maximum of amusement—panem et circenses.
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“The forgotten Spengler has his revenge by threatening to be right in the end. . . . Spengler has hardly found an opponent worthy of him: collective amnesia provides the escape.”—Theodor
#Adorno
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What we recognize as “order” today, and express in “Liberal” constitutions, is nothing but anarchy become a habit.
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When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard “having children” as a question of pro’s and con’s, the great turning point has come. For Nature knows nothing of pro and con.
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Man is the soul-suffering animal. That is his depth, his greatness. That is why man’s world history is a tragedy. For everything he expresses, his entire culture, his wanting & struggling, art, religion, state, war, has arisen from the suffering of the soul’s existence.
#Spengler
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1/ Real nations are, like every living organism, of high internal structural complication and constitute a kind of order by their mere existence. But political Rationalism understands by a “nation” freedom from and struggle against any sort of order. “Nation” is for Rationalism
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Long, long ago the country bore the country town & nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding & devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies & dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.
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There is no getting away from it: conflict is the original fact of life, is life itself, & not the most pitiful pacifist is able entirely to uproot the pleasure it gives his inmost soul. At least theoretically, he would like to fight & destroy all opponents of pacifism.
#Spengler
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To look at the world, no longer from the heights as Aeschylus, Plato, Dante and Goethe did, but from the standpoint of oppressive actualities is to exchange the bird’s perspective for the frog’s. This exchange is a fair measure of the fall from Culture to Civilization.
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Ideas that have become blood demand blood. War is the eternal pattern of higher human existence, and countries exist for war’s sake; they are signs of readiness for war.
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Happy birthday, Oswald Spengler, 29 May 1880.
(Oswald Spengler Society).
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To look at the world, no longer from the heights as Aeschylus, Plato, Dante and Goethe did, but from the standpoint of oppressive actualities is to exchange the bird’s perspective for the frog’s.
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The women’s emancipation of Ibsen’s time wanted, not freedom from the husband, but freedom from the child, from the burden of children, just as men’s emancipation in the same period signified freedom from the duties towards family, nation, and State.
#Spengler
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At the beginning a man was wealthy because he was powerful—now he is powerful because he has money. Intellect reaches the throne only when money puts it there. Democracy is the completed equating of money with political power.
#Spengler
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Man is a beast of prey. Acute thinkers, like Montaigne and Nietzsche, have always known this. The life wisdom in the old fairy-tales and proverbs of all peasant and nomad folk; the smiling penetration characteristic of the great connoisseur of men, whether statesman or general,
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Oswald Spengler's parents, Bernhard and Pauline, with the baby Oswald.
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he predicted the impending collapse of the West with a kind of intellectual glee, but privately shuddered at the consequences of his gloomy discoveries.»
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Politics is the highest and most powerful dimension of all historical existence. World history is the history of states; the history of states is the history of wars. Ideas, when they press for decisions, assume the form of political units: countries, peoples, or parties.
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Liberalism is for the simple-minded, for those who like to chat a great deal about things they can never achieve.
#Spengler
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That democracy and universal suffrage are reliable tools of capitalism has been proved in all countries that have adopted these methods on the English model.
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It has been 84 years since Oswald Spengler's death. The 8th May 1936.
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I call upon all who have marrow in their bones and blood in their veins. Train yourselves! Become men! We need no more ideologists, no more chatter about Bildung and cosmopolitanism and Germany’s intellectual mission. We need hardness, we need a courageous skepticism . . .
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I see, long after A.D. 2000, cities laid out for ten to twenty million inhabitants, spread over enormous areas of countryside, with buildings that will dwarf the biggest of today’s & notions of traffic and communication that we should regard as fantastic to the point of madness.
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Marx, with his theory, belongs to England, that his conception of the class struggle presupposes the conception of labour as a commodity, not as a profession, as the content of life;
Nothing is more evident than that modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on which both systems are based is identical; both of their ideals are qualitatively identical, including the premises connected to a world the center of which
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Coming really soon from Arktos Media, within half a month (most likely). Newly edited and with a new layout.
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World history is the history of states; the history of states is the history of wars.
#Spengler
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When a tremendous misfortune falls upon a man, it becomes clear how much strength and good was in him. When fate crushes a people, it reveals its inner greatness or smallness. Only the utmost danger unmistakably shows the historical rank of a nation.
#Spengler
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Barbarism is that which I call strong race, the eternal warlike in the type of the beast-of-prey man. It often seems to have ceased to exist, but it is crouching in the soul ready to spring. Given a big challenge—and it is on top of the enemy.
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World history is the history of human thoroughbreds that wither away in the spirit. It doesn't depend upon the individual. The death of however many is replaced by the fertility of the mothers: the stream of life continues. And where this is not the case, it is over,
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we cannot look at the beautiful old handwork of a lively and primitive people without wishing to replace it by a modern technical process. Whether it has meaning or not, our technical thinking must have its actualisation.
#Spengler
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The higher man is a doom. With his graves, he leaves the earth as a battlefield and a place of ruins. He has drawn plant and animal, sea and mountain, into his ruin. He has drawn the face of the world in blood, mutilated it, torn it apart. But there was greatness in it.
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“I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. . . .
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The noble, warrior, and adventurer lives in the world of facts; the priest, scholar, and philosopher in his world of truths. The one is (or suffers) a destiny, the other thinks in causality. The former make intellect the servant of a strong living;
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A man of great deeds, like Napoleon, who wavers and doubts in moments of a difficult decision, experiences the point where the thinking of cause and effect proves to be insubstantial and fate reveals itself. Then no more thinking helps, only instinct, faith in the star.
#Spengler
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There is a natural distinction of grade between men born to command and men born to service, between the leaders and the led of life. The existence of this distinction is a plain fact, and in healthy periods and by healthy peoples it is admitted (even if unwillingly) by everyone.
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"Equal rights" are contrary to nature, are an indication of the departure from type of ageing societies, are the beginning of their irrevocable decline.
#Spengler
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Every nobility is a living symbol of Time, every priesthood of Space. Destiny and sacred Causality, History and Nature, the When and the Where, race and language, sex life and feeling life—all these attain in them to the highest possible expression.
The aristocratic way of being is typified by a superiority that is virile, free, and personalized. It corresponds to the demand—which had typical expressions in the classical world—that what is lived internally as spirituality should manifest outwardly in an equilibrium of body,
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To look at the world, no longer from the heights as Æschylus, Plato, Dante, and Goethe did, but from the standpoint of oppressive actualities is to exchange the bird's perspective for the frog's. This exchange is a fair measure of the fall from Culture to Civilisation.
#Spengler
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People with tired, cowardly, senile souls seek refuge from the age in something which by reason of its miraculous doctrines and customs is better able to rock them into the sleep of oblivion than the Christian churches. The credo quia absurdum is again uppermost.
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The last conflict is at hand in which the Civilization receives its conclusive form—the conflict between money and blood.
#Spengler
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Life is a struggle involving plants, animals, and humans. It is a struggle between individuals, social classes, peoples, and nations, and it can take the form of economic, social, political, and military competition. It is a struggle for the power to make one’s will prevail,
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An honourable end is the one thing that cannot be taken from Man.
#Spengler
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I call upon all who have marrow in their bones and blood in their veins. Train yourselves. Become men! We need hardness, we need a courageous skepticism. Thoughts and schemes are nothing without power.
#Spengler
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2/ It is passionately religious in a way we Western Europeans have not been, indeed could not have been, for centuries. As soon as this religious drive is directed toward a goal, it possesses an immense expansive potential.
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What is culture? Culture is like a rich house. Children ‘see’ nothing of the precious furniture, tapestries, vases. They live in their own world. Only slowly do you grow into the culture of such a manor.
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Bismarck was a Classic of politics. He based his calculations entirely on things that existed, things he could see and manipulate. The fanatical patriots neither loved nor understood him until his creative work appeared as a finished product,
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Men are tired to disgust of money-economy. They hope for salvation from somewhere or other, for some real thing of honor and chivalry, of inward nobility, of unselfishness and duty.
#Spengler
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1/ In order to overcome man’s inborn lethargy, the Prussian socialist ethic maintains that the chief aim of life is not happiness. “Do your duty,” it says, “by doing your work.” The English capitalist ethic says, “Get rich, and then you won’t have to work any more.”
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The true political shape of any given country is not be found in the wording of its constitution; it is, rather, the unwritten and unconscious laws according to which the constitution is put into effect.
#Spengler
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A woman of race does not desire to be a “companion” or a “lover,” but a mother; and not the mother of one child, to serve as a toy and distraction, but of many: the instinct of a strong race speaks in the pride that large families inspire,
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The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. The notion of democracy is often no different than living under a plutocracy or a government by wealthy elites.
#Spengler
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4/ or a Chinese long before Confucius would be if they were suddenly to appear among us. The Russians have been aware of this every time they have drawn a line of demarcation between “Mother Russia” and “Europe.”
#Spengler
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Liberalism is for the simple-minded, for those who like to chat a great deal about things they can never achieve. . . Every man for himself: that is an English idea. . . Liberalism, however, means “the state for itself, and every man for himself.”
#Spengler
Liberal society is both a society of individuals and a market society where economic reason subordinates all social relations and which it makes the site of generalized competition, of the war of all against all, where everyone wants to maximize his own interest at the expense
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Life is hard, if it is to be great. It only admits a choice between victory and defeat, not between war and peace.
#Spengler
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All revolutions start from the decline of State supremacy. A street insurrection can never have this effect; it is a mere consequence. A modern republic is nothing but the ruin of a monarchy that has given itself up.
#Spengler
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We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii,
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A power can be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and no power that can confront money is left but this one. Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood.
#Spengler
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Unfortunately the inclination for a heroic view of life is not present in part of the young generation. The need for optimism is basically a sentimental and decadent frame of mind which was not yet current when I was young.
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It is a piece of intellectual stupidity to want to substitute something else for the social structure that has grown up through the centuries and is fortified by tradition. There is no substituting anything else for Life. After Life there is only Death.
#Spengler
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2/ and longer over the Western world. The distinctions between Russian and Western spirit cannot be drawn too sharply. As deep a cleavage as there is between the spirit, religion, politics, and economics of England, Germany, America, and France,
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The forces which will sway the future are no other than those of the past. They are: the will of the Strong, healthy instincts, race, the will to possession & power; while justice, happiness, & peace—those dreams which will always remain dreams—hover ineffectively over them.
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All great discoveries and inventions spring from the delight of strong men in victory. They are expressions of personality and not of the utilitarian thinking of the masses, who are merely spectators of the event, but must take its consequences whatever they may be.
#Spengler
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