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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.

— Oswald Spengler The Decline of the West (1918)

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Democracy

More quotes by Oswald Spengler

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.

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Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.

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The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!

Vladimir Lenin The State and Revolution (1917)

The law itself is the instrument of the ruling class; hence it is a logical impossibility for another class to assume power legally.

Oliver Cox Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948)

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of bourgeois stupidity.

Gustave Flaubert

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Oswald Spengler (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.