18 quotes
The dictature of money marches on, tending to its material peak, in the Faustian Civilization as in every other.
The Decline of the West (1918)
Marxism is the capitalism of the working class.
Prussianism and Socialism (1919)
War is the eternal pattern of higher human existence, and countries exist for war’s sake; they are signs of readiness for war.
Prussianism and Socialism (1919)
Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.
In reality money, like numbers and law, is a category of thought. There is a monetary, just as there is a juristic and a mathematical and a technical, thinking of the world-around.
All young [religious] sects are at bottom hostile to State and property, class and rank, and are attracted to universal equality.
The Hour of Decision (1933)
And that, at bottom, is the intention. We do not seek to alter and improve, but to destroy.
The Hour of Decision (1933)
Death, for the author of the John Gospel as for the strict Moslem, is not the end of life, but a Something, a death-force, that contends with a life-force for the possession of man.
The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.
Once the command wavers in its intentions and its attitude — or itself abdicates, as in 1918 — the bravest regiment becomes on the spot a cowardly and helpless herd.
The Hour of Decision (1933)
It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought. Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither ways nor aims in common.
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.
The Hour of Decision (1933)
For, as it happens, this is the one example of a Culture ended by violent death. It was not starved, suppressed, or thwarted, but murdered in the full glory of its unfolding, destroyed like a sunflower whose head is struck off by one passing.
Critical (i.e., separating) methods apply only to the world-as-nature. It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought. Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither ways nor aims in common.
This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us; to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves; to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.
Good Advice (1982)
Everything that our present-day psychologist has to tell us—and here we refer not only to the systematic science but also in the wider sense to the physiognomic knowledge of men—relates to the present condition of the Western soul, and not, as hitherto gratuitously assumed, to “the human soul” at large.
At the end of the [eighteenth] century Spain had long ceased to be a great power, and France was on the way to following her example. Both were old and exhausted nations, proud but weary, looking towards the past, but lacking the true ambition—which is to be strictly differentiated from jealousy—to continue to play a creative part in the future.
The Hour of Decision (1933)
To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.
The Decline of the West (1918)