Matt

“Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour. The voice was Schlieffen’s, [the general who concocted the attack plan] but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of compulsory Kultur, of Nietzsche who told them that Supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, of the whole German people, who called their temporal ruler the “All-Highest.” What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae, but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on “the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute.”
― Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August

“For the Christian, the sacred doctrine is revealed theology; for the Jew and the Muslim, the sacred doctrine is, at least primarily, the legal interpretation of the Divine Law (talmud or fiqh). The sacred doctrine in the latter sense has, to say the least, much less in common with philosophy than the sacred doctrine in the former sense. It is ultimately for this reason that the status of philosophy was, as a matter of principle, much more precarious in Judaism and in Islam than in Christianity: in Christianity philosophy became an integral part of the officially recognized and even required training of the student of the sacred doctrine. This difference explains partly the eventual collapse of philosophic inquiry in the Islamic and in the Jewish world, a collapse which has no parallel in the Western Christian world.”
― Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing

“I never can understand how two men can write a book together. To me, that’s like three people getting together to have a baby.”
― Evelyn Waugh

“Satanism, in principle, is a perverse projection of the Law into matter. Therefore, even this path has its aesthetic elements. For there are also artists of evil, artists who can give flowing blood the magic of a crimson evening afterglow—adepts of delusion, who with a mere sight, evoke the seductive song of Death and loathsome orgies turn into a wild cascade of ardent memories.”
― Pierre de Lasenic, Sexual Mysteries: Oriental Love & Sexual Magic