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

“Neo-Spenglerians who are attuned to the racial view of history (call them "racists" for convenience) hold that the "final" phase of a Culture—the imperialistic stage—is final only because the cultural organism destroys its body and kills its soul by this process. Obviously, if we are to draw analogies between cultures and organisms we must agree that the soul of the organism dies only because of the death of the body. The soul can sicken—the soul of the West is now diseased and perhaps mortally ill—but it cannot die unless the organism itself dies. And this, point out the racists, is precisely what has happened to all previous cultures; death of the organism being the natural result of the suicidal process of imperialism.”
― Willis Carto, An Appeal to Reason: a Compendium of the Writings of Willis A. Carto

“De interpretatie van de natuur in mathematisch-functionele termen is door en door faustisch van aard, om hier een uitdrukking van Oswald Spengler te gebruiken: de Europese wil tot macht die naar de oneindigheid streeft en dus ook geen grenzen kan accepteren.”
― Ad Verbrugge, Tijd van onbehagen: filosofische essays over een cultuur op drift

“The war, that was meant to be over in a few weeks, or, at worst, a few months, dragged on for four grinding years. All generations felt the lash, but the cut ran deepest among the young men. During the hostilities Emile Durkheim lost many of his most talented students: Maxime David, Antoine Bianconi, Charles Peguy, Jean Rainier and Robert Hertz, all perished at the Front... When he learned the sad news that his son, Andre´ had succumbed from his battle wounds, he wrote, in a letter to his nephew, Marcel Mauss, ‘I feel detached from all worldly interests. I don’t know if I ever laughed much, but I’m through with laughing . . . due to no longer having any temporal interest’ (Besnard and Fournier, 1998: 508)...

Durkheim died on 15 November 1917, nearly a full year before the Armistice brought hostilities to an end. One cannot rid oneself of the feeling that he died of a broken heart… It was not just his son, his most promising students and the children of others, who had died. The rational hopes of the Enlightenment, and the positive sociology of La Belle Epoque, lay in shreds.

(Chris Rojek, The longue durée of Spengler’s thesis of the Decline of the West, 2017)”
― Chris Rojek

“A central thesis of both Spengler and Toynbee is that the world of late civilization was resacralized – made religious again – not because critical intelligence was persecuted and repressed, or starved of resources, but because it ended up attacking and refuting itself. Rationalism ate itself. Today, postmodernism is a hyper-cynical and skeptical critical philosophy, laying waste to all truth claims, including, arguably, its own. This can never satisfy anyone, so the world moves on to something else. It rediscovers religion. It’s more fun, if nothing else. All philosophical traditions turn on themselves and kill themselves. When Nietzsche said, “God is dead”, he might as well have said, “Philosophy is dead.” And he was arguably its leading assassin. He was Brutus plunging the dagger into Caesar. When you do that, Christ appears where Caesar once stood. It’s essential for intellectuals to make absolute truth claims. If they don’t, priests, prophets and gurus will do so, and fill the vacuum. Jordan Peterson increasingly postures as a guru proclaiming absolute truth (the Logos). But at least he’s a guru exposing the people to the great intellectual ideas of Nietzsche and Jung.”
― John Tierney, Jordan Peterson and the Second Religiousness: Explaining the Jordan Peterson Phenomenon

“If I call man a beast of prey, which do I insult: man or beast? For remember, the larger beasts of prey are noble creatures, perfect of their kind, and without the hypocrisy of human moral due to weakness.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol 2: Perspectives of World History

“Democrația a devenit o armă a intereselor băneşti. Ea folosește mass-media pentru a crea iluzia că există consimțământul celor guvernați. Presa de astăzi este o armată cu arme atent organizate, jurnaliştii fiind ofițerii ei, iar cititorii, soldații. Cititorul nu ştie şi nici nu trebuie să cunoască scopurile pentru care este folosit şi rolul pe care trebuie să-l joace.
Noţiunea de democrație adesea nu diferă cu nimic de a trăi sub o plutocrație sau sub o guvernare a elitelor bogate.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

“Every man is his own priest” is a conviction to which men could win through, but only as that pet of the priesthood which involves duties, not as to that which possesses power. No man confessed himself with the inward certainty of absolution.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol 2: Perspectives of World History