Booksearcher > Booksearcher's Quotes

“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Revolution is progressive and seeks the strengthening of the state; rebellion is reactionary and seeks its disappearance.

The revolutionary is a potential government official; the rebel is a reactionary in action.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“The course of history as a whole is no object of experience; history has no edios, because the course of history extends into the unknown future.”
― Eric Voegelin

“How did Kirchmann understand the worthlessness of jurisprudence ? The answer lies in the aphorism: "Three revisions by the legislator and whole libraries became wastepaper." With a sharp alteration this answer became a slogan:"A stroke of the legislator's pen and whole libraries became wastepaper." Another aphorism in the same vein made the point even more brusquely and less politely: "Positive law turns the jurist into a worm in rotten wood." Kirchmann meant that jurisprudence could never catch up with legislation. Thus our predicament becomes immediately obvious. What remains of a science reduced to annotating and interpreting constantly changing regulations issued by state agencies presumed to be in the best position to know and articulate their true intent?”
― Carl Schmitt

“The crisis of European jurisprudence began a century ago with the victory of legal positivism.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Plight of European Jurisprudence

“True law is not imposed; it arises from unintentional developments. (...)Law emerges (...) as something not merely legislated but given. The later positivism knows no origin and has no home. It recognizes only causes or basic norms. It seeks to be the opposite of “unintended” law. Its ultimate goal is control and calculability.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Plight of European Jurisprudence

“The motorization of law into mere decree was not yet the culmination of simplifications and accelerations. New accelerations were produced by market regulations and state control of the economy —with their numerous and transferable authorizations and subauthorizations to various offices, associations and commissions concerned with economic decisions. Thus in Germany, the concept of “directive” appeared next to the concept of “decree.” This was “the elastic form of legislation,” surpassing the decree in terms of speed and simplicity. Whereas the decree was called a “motorized law,” the directive became a “motorized decree.” Here independent, purely positivist jurisprudence lost its freedom of maneuver. Law became a means of planning, an administrative act, a directive.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Plight of European Jurisprudence

“Hauriou, became a crown witness for us when he confirmed this connection in 1916, in the midst of WWI: “The revolution of 1789 had no other goal than absolute access to the writing of legal statutes and the systematic destruction of customary institutions. It resulted in a state of permanent revolution because the mobility of the writing of laws did not provide for the stability of certain customary institutions, because the forces of change were stronger than the forces of stability. Social and political life in France was completely emptied of institutions and was only able to provisionally maintain itself by sudden jolts spurred by the heightened morality.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Plight of European Jurisprudence

“Legality has become a poisonous dagger, with which one party stabs the other in the back.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Plight of European Jurisprudence

“The essence and value of the law lies in its stability and durability (...), in its “relative eternity.” Only then does the legislator’s self-limitation and the independence of the law-bound judge find an anchor. The experiences of the French Revolution showed how an unleashed pouvoir législatif could generate a legislative orgy.”
― Carl Schmitt, The Plight of European Jurisprudence

“In the final analysis, what is it that we call popular, democratic power? Beyond the expressed will of the people, as it is supposedly formulated, there is no appeal; here we meet the absolute, the universal, the indivisible, and the immovable. There is nothing a priori, nothing anterior to democratic power; no ideas of truth, no notions of good or bad, can bind the Popular Will. This 'will' is free in the sense that it stands above all notions of value. It is egalitarian because it is reared on arithmetic equality..It is not open to any appeal, it listens to no demand for grace, no plea for compassion. Like the Sphinx, the Popular Will is immovable in its enigmatic silence.”
― Tage Lindbom, The Myth of Democracy

“To hear these defenders of democracy talk, one would think that the people deliberate like a committee of wise men, whereas in truth judicial murders, foolhardy undertakings, wild choices, and above all foolish and disastrous wars are eminently the prerogatives of this form of government."

Study on Sovereignty.”
― Joseph de Maistre

“Del amor me cuesta hablar. Ahora estoy seguro de que Valérie fue una radiante excepción. Se contaba entre esos seres capaces de dedicar su vida a la felicidad de otra persona, de convertir esa felicidad en su objetivo. Es un fenómeno misterioso. Entraña la dicha, la sencillez y la alegría; pero sigo sin saber por qué o cómo se produce. Y si no he entendido el amor, ¿de qué me serviría entender todo lo demás?”
― Michel Houellebecq, Plataforma

“Is precisely in market dealings that market prices are formed for all kinds of goods and services, which will be taken as the bases of calculation. Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation."
"eben im Marktverkehr für alle Arten von verwendeten Gütern und Arbeiten Marktpreise gebildet werden, die zur Grundlage der Rechnung genommen werden können. Wo der freie Marktverkehr fehlt, gibt es keine Preisbildung; ohne Preisbildung gibt es keine Wirtschaftsrechnung.”
― Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth

“The market system is the basis of our civilization. Its only alternative is the Führer principle.”
― Ludwig von Mises

“The seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state's power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist hands or may be considered the result of a contract, etc. People begin to dispute the sacred right of the individual ruler or authority without being aware that at the same time they are playing into the hands of a colossal state power.”
― Jacob Burckhardt, Judgments on History and Historians

“Throughout history many nations have suffered a physical defeat, but that has never marked the end of a nation. But when a nation has become the victim of a psychological defeat, then that marks the end of a nation.”
― Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History

“Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.”
― Baltasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom: A Pocket Oracle

“For over twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own.

This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“All this shouldn't last; but it will, always; the human 'always' of course, a century, two centuries... and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.”
― Giuseppe di Lampedusa

“A house of which one knew every room wasn't worth living in.”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“Porque morir por alguien o por algo, está bien, entra en el orden de las cosas; pero conviene saber, o por lo menos estar seguros de que alguien sabe por quiën o por qué se muere”
― Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“The triumph of vegetation is total.”
― Michel Houellebecq, La carte et le territoire

“[Standing armies] constantly threaten other nations with war by giving the appearance that they are prepared for it, which goads nations into competing with one another in the number of men under arms, and this practice knows no bounds. And since the costs related to maintaining peace will in this way finally become greater than those of a short war, standing armies are the cause of wars of aggression that are intended to end burdensome expenditures. Moreover, paying men to kill or be killed appears to use them as mere machines and tools in the hands of another (the nation), which is inconsistent with the rights of humanity.”
― Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace

“I, as an anarch, renouncing any bond, any limitation of freedom, also reject compulsory education as nonsense. It was one of the greatest well-springs of misfortune in the world.”
― Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil

“I, as an anarch, renouncing any bond, any limitation of freedom, also reject compulsory education as nonsense. It was one of the greatest well-springs of misfortune in the world.

Compulsory schooling is essentially a means of curtailing natural strength and exploiting people. The same is true of military conscription, which developed within the same context. The anarch rejects both of them - just like obligatory vaccination and insurance of all kinds. He has reservations when swearing an oath. He is not a deserter, but a conscientious objector.”
― Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil

“The anarch is oriented to facts, not ideas. He fights alone, as a free man, and would never dream of sacrificing himself to having one inadequacy supplant another and a new regime triumph over the old one. In this sense, he is closer to the philistine; the baker whose chief concern is to bake good bread; the peasant, who works his plow while armies march across his fields.”
― Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil

“I am an anarch – not because I despise authority, but because I need it. Likewise, I am not a nonbeliever, but a man who demands something worth believing in.”
― Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil

“The anarch wages his own wars, even when marching in rank and file”
― Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil

“Law and custom are becoming the subjects of a new field of learning. The anarch endeavors to judge them ethnographically, historically, and also – I will probably come back to this – morally. The State will be generally satisfied with him; it will scarcely notice him In this respect he bears a certain resemblance to the criminal – say, the master spy – whose gifts are concealed behind a run-of-the-mill occupation.”
― Ernst Jünger, Eumeswil