Corneliu Zelea Codreanu > Quotes

“The country is dying cause of an lack of men, not a lack of programms.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, For My Legionaries

“Its culture: the fruit of its life, the product of its own efforts in thought and art. This culture is not international. It is the expression of the national genius, of the blood. The culture is international in its brilliance but national in origin. Someone made a fine comparison: bread and wheat may be internationally consumed, but they always bear the imprint of the soil from which they came.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, For My Legionaries

“If I had but one bullet and were faced by both an enemy and a traitor, I would let the traitor have it.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, For My Legionaries

“Legionary life is beautiful, not because of riches, partying or the acquisition of luxury, but because of the noble comradeship which binds all Legionaries in a sacred brotherhood of struggle.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, For My Legionaries

“A nation lives forever through its concepts, honour, and culture. It is for these reasons that the rulers of nations must judge and act not only on the basis of physical and material interests of the nation but on the basis of the nation's historical honour, of the nation's eternal interests. Thus: not bread at all costs, but honour at all costs.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, For My Legionaries

“The Politician's goal is to build a fortune, ours is to build our homeland flowering and strong. For her we will work and we will build. For her we will make each Romanian a hero, ready to fight, ready to sacrifice, ready to die.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, The Nest Leader's Manual

“The law of silence: Speak little. Say only what you must. Speak only when necessary. Your oratory should be deeds, not words. You accomplish: let others talk.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, The Nest Leader's Manual

“Dear comrade in arms,
after 15 years of battles, persecutions and sacrifices,
Romania's youth must know
that the hour of the Legionaire victory isn't far.

All of our enemies attempts will be crushed.
All plans of tempting us,
All attempts at buying our souls,
All attempts of seperating us,
and all treasons will fall to the ground.

Look at them, at your tyrants,
straight in their eyes.

Endure with submission all blows,
endure all pains,
whatever they may be,
because our sacrifices will be the iron foundation
made from broken bodies
and from tortured souls,
of our Victory.

Those, among us, who will fall
will have names and tombs of heroes,
and those who will kill us
will bear the names of traitors
and will be cursed from generation to generation.

From the depths
the Legionnaire rises victorious with his rock-like soul.

Those who think they can defeat him...
as well as those who think they can buy him...
will soon, but too late...
Come to the conclusion...
that they were wrong.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

“May God accept my suffering, for the well-being and prosperity of our Nation. Pain upon pain, suffering upon suffering, agony upon agony, wound upon wound in our bodies and in our souls, fall after fall: in this way shall we conquer.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, The Prison Notes

“From this Legionary school a new man will have to emerge, a man with heroic qualities; a giant of our history to do battle and win over all the enemies of our Fatherland, his battle and victory having to extend even beyond the material world into the realm of invisible enemies, the powers of evil. Everything that our mind can imagine as more beautiful spiritually; everything the proudest that our race can produce, greater, more just, more powerful, wiser, purer, more diligent and more heroic, this is what the Legionary school must give us! A man in whom all the possibilities of human grandeur that are implanted by God in the blood of our people be developed to the maximum. This hero, the product of Legionary education, will also know how to elaborate programs; will also know how to solve the Jewish problem; will also know how to organize the state well; will also know how to convince other Romanians; and if not, he will know how to win, for that is why he is a hero. This hero, this Legionary of bravery, labour, and justice, with the powers God implanted in his soul, will lead our Fatherland on the road of its glory.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, For My Legionaries

“There are moments when masses establish contact with their nation's spirit. These are the moments of providence. Masses then see their nation in its entire history, and feel its moments of glory, as well as those of defeat. Then they can clearly feel turbulent events in the future. That contact with the immortal and collective nation's spirit is feverish and trembling. When that happens, people cry. It is probably some kind of national mystery, which some criticize, because they don't know what it represents, and others struggle to define it, because they have never felt it.
If the Christian mystery, which tends to ecstasy, is contact between Man and God, through, "ascent from human to divine nature", then the national mystery is nothing more than man's contact, or contact of mass, with the spirit of its nation. Not intellectually, for it could be the case with any historian, but live, in their hearts.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, For My Legionaries

“Wherever the Legionary’s hand and soul show up, a garden appears.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, For My Legionaries

“A country has the Jews it deserves. Just as mosquitoes can thrive and settle only in swamps, likewise the former can only thrive in the swamps of our sins.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, For My Legionaries

“I see the true destiny of our people as lying not in time but in eternity. Political achievements, culture, struggles and national greatness are means, not ends in themselves. The ultimate goal is not life but resurrection.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, The Prison Notes

“Anyone wishing to conquer a people could do it by using this system: breaking its ties with heaven and land, introducing fratricidal quarrels and fights, promoting immorality and licentiousness, by material ruin, physical poisoning, drunkenness. All these destroy a nation more than being blasted by thousands of cannons or bombed by thousands of airplanes.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

“The individual within the framework and in the service of his people. The people within the framework and in the service of their God and of God’s laws. Whoever shall understand these things will be victorious even if he be alone. Whoever shall not understand will be defeated.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, The Prison Notes

“At the head of peoples, above the elite, one finds the monarchy. I reject the republic.
...Not all of the monarchs were good. Monarchy itself, however, has always been good. One must not confuse the man with the institution and draw false conclusions. There can be bad priests; but can we, because of this, conclude that the Church must be abolished and God stoned to death? There are weak and bad monarchs, certainly, but we cannot renounce monarchy because of this. ...

To each nation God has traced a line of destiny. A monarch is great and good when he stays on that line; he is small or bad, to the extent that he wanders away from this line of destiny or opposes it. This then, is the law of monarchy. There are also other lines that may tempt a monarch: the line of personal interest or that of a class of people or group; the line of alien interests (domestic or foreign). He must avoid all these lines and follow that of his people.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, The Prison Notes

“Beyond the nation, we acknowledge those eternal and immutable principles in the name of which one must be ready to fight and die, subordinating all things to them, with no less readiness than if he were fighting for his own existence and right to life. Truth and honour, for instance, are metaphysical principles that we consider higher than our very nation.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

“We are all in favour of monarchy. It is just that we cannot renounce our mission and the struggle we are conducting against an old and corrupt world in the name of a new one.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, The Prison Notes

“May I receive calmy everything that the Lord sends, understanding that it is His Will.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, The Prison Notes

“We have first seized the front line of trenches, then the second and the third, and our adversary, shut up in his retreat, in the safety which it offers, is now firing at us, not knowing that we would like nothing better than to come to his aid against the real enemy.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, The Prison Notes

“Fascism is preoccupied by the clothing (namely the forms of state organization), National-Socialism by the body (namely the racial eugenics), whereas Legionarism is preoccupied by something much deeper: by the soul (namely by its strengthening through the cultivation of Christian virtues and its preparation with final salvation in mind, salvation dealt with by the Christian Church in the most perfect fashion).”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, The Nest Leader's Manual

“In 1919, 1920, 1921, the entire Jewish press was assaulting the Romanian state, unleashing disorder everywhere, urging violence against the regime, the form of government, the church, Romanian order, the national idea, patriotism.

Now, as if by a miracle, the same press, controlled by the same men, changed into a defender of the state’s order, of laws; declares itself against violence. While we become: ‘the country’s enemies’, ‘extremists of the Right’, ‘in the pay and service of Romania’s enemies’, etc. And in the end we will hear also this: that we are financed by the Jews. ...

We have endured outrage after outrage, ridicule after ridicule, slap after slap, until we have come to see ourselves in this frightening situation: Jews are considered to be defenders of Romanianism, sheltered from any unpleasantness, leading a life of peace and plenty, while we are considered enemies of our nation, with our liberty and life endangered, and we are hunted down like rabid dogs by all the Romanian authorities.

I witnessed with my own eyes these times and lived through them, and I was saddened to the depths of my soul. It is dreadful to fight for years on end for your fatherland, your heart as pure as tears, while enduring misery and hunger, then find yourself suddenly declared an enemy of your country, persecuted by your own kind, told that you fight because you are in the pay of foreigners, and see the entire Jewry master your land, assuming the role of defender of Romanianism and caretaker of the Romanian state, menaced by you, the youth of the country. Night after night we were troubled by these thoughts, occasionally feeling disgusted and immensely ashamed and we were seized by sadness.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, The Prison Notes

“Man is comprised of an organism, which is to say an organised form, and of vital forces, as well as a soul. The same may be said of a people. The national construction of a state, while taking account of all three elements, for various reasons of qualification and heredity can nevertheless be chiefly based upon a single one of these elements.

In my opinion, in the Fascist movement it is the state element that prevails, coinciding with organised force. What finds expression here is the shaping power of ancient Rome, that master of law and political organisation, the purest heirs to which are the Italians. National Socialism emphasises what is connected to vital forces: race, racial instinct, and the ethical and national element. The Romanian Legionary movement instead chiefly stresses what in a living organism corresponds to the soul: the spiritual and religious aspect.

This is the reason for the distinctive character of each national movement, although ultimately all three elements are taken into account, and none is overlooked. The specific character of our movement derives from our distant heritage. Already Herodotus called our forefathers “the immortal Dacians”. Our Geto-Thracian ancestors, even before Christianity, already had faith in the immortality and indestructibility of the soul – something which proves their spiritual drive. Roman colonisation introduced the Roman sense of organisation and form. Later centuries made our people miserable and divided; yet, just as a sick and beaten horse will still show traces of its nobility of stock, so too the Romanian people of yesterday and today reveals the latent features of its two-fold heritage.

It is this heritage that the Legionary movement seeks to awaken. It begins with the spirit: for the movement wishes to create a spiritually new man. Once we have met this goal as a “movement”, we must then awaken our second heritage – the politically shaping Roman power. The spirit and religion are thus our starting point; “constructive nationalism” is our point of arrival – almost a consequence. Joining these two points is the ascetic and at the same time heroic ethic of the Iron Guard.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, The Prison Notes

“May I receive calmly everything that the Lord sends, understanding that it is His Will.”
― Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, The Prison Notes