Ango Sakaguchi > Quotes

“He pursued false shadows and had nothing to show for it but exhaustion.”
― Sakaguchi Ango

“To live, and to fall--this is the correct procedure, and can there be any easy shortcut to the saving of humanity outside it?”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Some had said that they could not write because of military censorship, but the fact was that, war or no war, they had not the slightest idea how to write honestly on any subject. Truth or real feeling in writing had nothing to do with censorship. In whatever period these gentry had happened to live, their personalities would have been bound to display the same emptiness. They changed in accordance with the prevailing fashion and took for their models expression culled from popular novels of the day.”
― Sakaguchi Ango

“We were permitted every freedom, but one might say that when people are permitted every freedom, they become aware of their own inexplicable limits and needs. It is eternally impossible for humans to be free. This is because humans live, and must die, and because they think.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Even if you stabbed the young virgin to death and thereby succeeded in preserving her purity, when once you begin to hear the banal footsteps of decadence, those matter-of-fact footsteps like the endless lapping of waves upon the shore, you cannot help but recognize that the petty nature of human action, the petty nature of that virgins purity thus preserved, is nothing more than a bubble-like, empty illusion.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“It seems that the desire to end beautiful things while they are yet beautiful is a general feeling.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“The entire fate of the nation was being decided by the will of those men who had the feeblest power of introspection and by the blind actions of the ignorant mob that followed them.”
― Sakaguchi Ango

“It is not that humans have changed. Humans have been like this all along, and what has changed is only the outer layer of things.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“While trembling with fear, I yet gazed enchanted at the beauty. I had no need to think. This was because I saw before me only objects of beauty, not humans.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“It is not necessarily strange that the devil should also worship a god like a little child. Any contradiction is possible.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“The samurai of the old felt the need for the samurai ethic, to control the weakness within themselves and those below them.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Those who had safely escaped through the raging flames now crowded together beside a burning house for warmth against the cold, in a completely separate world from others a mere foot away who were desperately battling to extinguish those same flames.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Worshipping the emperor in fact was a means of displaying their own dignity, and also of being made aware of that dignity themselves.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“History is forever smelling out humans.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Japan was defeated, and the samurai ethic has perished, but humanity has been born from the womb of decadences truth.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“We all involuntarily worship some very stupid things, and are simply not aware of doing so.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“It is impossible to halt the process, and impossible to save humanity by halting it. Humans live and humans fall. There is no easy shortcut to the saving of humanity outside this.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“The look of the nation since defeat is one of pure and simple decadence.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“I cannot stand the sight of blood, and once when there was an automobile accident right in front of my eyes, I wheeled round and fled. Yet, I always liked grand destruction. While trembling at the shells and incendiary bombs, I was at the same time tremendously excited at such frenzied annihilation; and yet I believe that I never loved and longed for human beings more than at that time.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, 堕落論 [Darakuron]

“I completely fail to see what is so attractive about human existence; and yet I cannot but imagine that if I myself were a 60-year old shogun, then I too would be dragged into that courtroom clinging to life, and so in the end I am left feeling astounded at this strange force called life.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“They were simply the obedient children of fate.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“It is said that death is the end of both flesh and spirit, but I wonder about that. To be honest, I can't go along with the idea that, now that we've lost the war, it is the spirits of our fallen heroes who are most to be pitied.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Grand destruction--it's surprising love.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Compared to the banality of decadence, its banal matter-of-factness, one feels that the beauty of those people obedient to destiny, the beauty of the love in the midst of that appalling destruction, was a mere illusion, empty as a bubble.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“Perhaps these young girls were unaffected by the present reality because they were filled with dreams of the future, or perhaps it was due to their great vanity.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“There is no way to stop the descent of humans in general from the purity of the "loyal retainer" to mediocrity and then into damnation.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“We were dumbfounded at the foolishness of having to bow our heads every time the train turned under Yasukuni Shrine, but a certain type of person has to do that in order to be aware of himself, and we also, though we laugh at the foolishness of the Yasukuni Shrine affair, are ourselves perpetrating the same type of foolishness in other matters. It is only that we don't recognize our own foolishness.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“And while the samurai ethic is both inhumane and anti-human insofar as it is a set of stipulations against human nature, and instinct, and yet in that it is also a result of insight into that very nature and instinct, it is something entirely human.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“In the face of such grand destruction, there was destiny, but there was no decadence. They were innocent, but replete.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence

“It is impossible to prevent man's downfall.”
― Ango Sakaguchi, Discourse on Decadence