Oswald Spengler Quotes

“I do not know of anything in modern poetry as violently hostile to contemporary life as was the poetry of T. S. Eliot, which so perfectly fitted the mood of the young people between the two wars. I also find much more benevolence towards humanity in younger historians than there was in Spengler or in Toynbee. Still, it is not difficult to sense the disgust of the intellectuals at the new prosperous working class, 'with their eyes glued to the television screen,' who have become indifferent to radical ideas.”
― Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future

“Like Hamlet, Goethe's Faust offers a wide panorama of scenes from the vulgar to the sublime, with passages of wondrous poetry that can be sensed even through the veil of translation. And it also preserves the iridescence of its modern theme. From it Oswald Spengler christened our Western culture 'Faustian,' and others too have found it an unexcelled metaphor for the infinitely aspiring always dissatisfied modern self.

Goethe himself was wary of simple explanations. When his friends accused him of incompetence in metaphysics, he replied. 'I, being an artist, regard this as of little moment. Indeed, I prefer that the principle from which and through which I work should be hidden from me.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

“Earlier, I cited Oswald Spengler’s chilling century-old prophecy that “the era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them.” This is the real danger posed by Putin: that he will be a model for other national leaders who want to retain their grip on power indefinitely, despite political and legal constraints.”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Fascism: A Warning

“Michelangelo alone would tolerate no half-and-half. Clarity he wanted and he would have. The question of form was for him a religious matter; for him and only for him it was all or nothing. And this is the explanation of the lonely fearful wrestlings of this man, surely the unhappiest figure in our art; of the fragmentary, the tortured, the unsatisfied, the terrible in his forms that frightened his contemporaries. No man ever made a more honest effort than he did to find a way with the chisel into a buried world.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol 1: Form and Actuality