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Oswald Spengler Quotes
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Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.
Oswald Spengler
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If few can stand a long war without deterioration of soul, none can stand a long peace.
Oswald Spengler
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There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money – and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.
Oswald Spengler
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I maintain that many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practice the dull craft of experimental psychology.
Oswald Spengler
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Philosophy, the love of Wisdom, is at the very bottom defence against the incomprehensible.
Oswald Spengler
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And so the development of the new mathematic consists of a long, secret, and finally victorious battle against the notion of magnitude.
Oswald Spengler
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To-day a democrat of the old school would demand, not freedom for the press, but freedom from the press; but mean-time the leaders have changed themselves into parvenus who have to secure their position vis-a-vis the masses.
Oswald Spengler
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Optimism is cowardice. We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end.
Oswald Spengler
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The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live – he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death.
Oswald Spengler
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Long, long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.
Oswald Spengler
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Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.
Oswald Spengler
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Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to want to think, and this they consider freedom.
Oswald Spengler
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The common man wants nothing of life but health, longevity, amusement, comfort- happiness. He who does not despise this should turn his eyes from world history, for it contains nothing of the sort. The best that history has created is great suffering.
Oswald Spengler
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Statistics belong, like chronology, to the domain of the organic, to fluctuating Life, to Destiny and Incident, and not to the world of laws and timeless causality.
Oswald Spengler
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Critical (i.e., separating) methods apply only to the world-as-nature. It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought. Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither ways nor aims in common.
Oswald Spengler
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A resolute leader who collects ten thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes.
Oswald Spengler
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Gothic cathedrals and Doric temples are mathematics in stone.
Oswald Spengler
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We have learned that history is something that takes no notice whatever of our expectations.
Oswald Spengler
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You are caught in the current of unceasing change. Your life is a ripple in it. Every moment of your conscious life links the infinite past with the infinite future. Take part in both and you will not find the present empty.
Oswald Spengler
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The mathematic, then, is an art. As such it has its styles and style periods. It is not, as the layman and the philosopher (who is in this matter a layman too) imagine, substantially unalterable, but subject like every art to unnoticed changes form epoch to epoch. The development of the great arts ought never to be treated without an (assuredly not unprofitable) side-glance at contemporary mathematics.
Oswald Spengler
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One cannot learn how to be creative by reading Marx. Either one is creative or one is not.
Oswald Spengler
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What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears.
Oswald Spengler
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One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.
Oswald Spengler
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Everything that our present-day psychologist has to tell us—and here we refer not only to the systematic science but also in the wider sense to the physiognomic knowledge of men—relates to the present condition of the Western soul, and not, as hitherto gratuitously assumed, to the human soul at large.
Oswald Spengler
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All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.
Oswald Spengler
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When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard 'having children' as a question of pro's and con's, the great turning point has come.
Oswald Spengler
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And the National Socialists believe that they can afford to ignore the world or oppose it, and build their castles-in-the-air without creating a possibly silent, but very palpable reaction from abroad.
Oswald Spengler
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Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them.
Oswald Spengler
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To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.
Oswald Spengler
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The press today is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty.
Oswald Spengler
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Quote of the day
Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.
Wyndham Lewis
Oswald Spengler
Creative Commons
Born:
May 29, 1880
Died:
May 8, 1936
(aged 55)
Bio:
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler was a German historian and philosopher of history whose interests included mathematics, science, and art.
Most used words:
money
time
freedom
people
country
life
day
history
press
human
world
man
soul
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