Curtis Yarvin Quotes

184 Sourced Quotes

I see this Hitler-was-a-liberal trope catching on all over the right. Of course, it is a leftist trope—in two senses. First, the tactic of tarring all political adversaries with some abstruse connection to fascism in general, and Hitler in particular, is of course a characteristic tactic of the Left. Second, the tactic of disseminating a palpable misreading of history, for political purposes—etc.

Curtis Yarvin
Yes, the US military should leave Iraq and Afghanistan. But it should leave not because it is impossible for a modern military to defeat a bunch of tribal warriors. It should leave because it is fighting an American civil war by proxy. One, this is just sick. And two, the right place to fight a civil war is always at home.

Curtis Yarvin
In the English language as we use it now, words like progressive and conservative are actually relative designations. Progressive means "left of the mainstream" and conservative means "right of the mainstream." When the mainstream shifts, these words have to shift as well, and the result is that many of the radical left-wing ideas of 1907 would be radical right-wing ideas in 2007.

Curtis Yarvin
The reason it's so difficult to oppose lawful democracy is that we have so few alternatives to compare it to.

Curtis Yarvin
A sovereign should never make any concessions in response to violence or the threat of violence, unless there is no alternative but surrender.

Curtis Yarvin
A good test for getting rid of anything is: if we didn't have this, would we need it?

Curtis Yarvin
In a democracy with a free press, the press is the government. Public opinion on any subject will naturally shift toward the opinions of those who explain that subject to the public.

Curtis Yarvin
From the perspective of its subjects, what counts is not who runs the government, but what the government does. Good government is effective, lawful government. Bad government is ineffective, lawless government. How anyone reasonable could disagree with these statements is quite beyond me. And yet clearly almost everyone does.

Curtis Yarvin
The Western world certainly has all the physical and human tools it needs to restore civilization in the Third World and resume the work of Lord Cromer. But it lacks the legal and political tools, and until it has those it shouldn't even try. As in Vietnam, it ends up just handing victories to its adversaries, who use the result as simply one more piece of evidence that demonstrates their invincibility.

Curtis Yarvin
All the great crimes of the recent past have been committed by states which portrayed themselves as profoundly ethical actors. Removing this mask, eliminating the ability of the beast to portray itself as good, uninstalls an essential module in this perverse system.

Curtis Yarvin
[…] far from advancing toward tolerance for all, Western civilization is being overrun by an aggressive and intolerant monoculture.

Curtis Yarvin
The irony of the postwar age is that this reign of global peace, this universalist millennium, was achieved by the Allied victory in the most ruthless war in modern history, in which neither side displayed the slightest respect for enemy civilians.

Curtis Yarvin
Once you go to college, you are no longer in the real America. You are in a fortified outpost of future America, which has been planted in the real America to enlighten and assimilate it.

Curtis Yarvin
The strong government executes firmly and decisively. The weak one is fickle and inconsistent, and as a result has to be much more vicious to achieve any given level of security.

Curtis Yarvin
The relative peace of the last sixty years has been achieved only at the price of creating a university system which is an established church in all but name, and which suppresses any thought it finds even remotely disturbing.

Curtis Yarvin
Thus applying libertarian principles of natural rights […] moves a state not toward the libertarian goal of spontaneous order, but away from it—i. e. toward chaos, defeat, and destruction. Because its enemies use artillery, and it doesn't. Its enemies do not bother with trials, and it does. Etc. Therefore it is weak, and cannot produce any order at all, spontaneous or otherwise.

Curtis Yarvin
Democracy means that popular opinion controls the state; intellectuals guide popular opinion; ergo, intellectuals guide the state.

Curtis Yarvin
[…] the most absolute and amoral of powers can have good reasons to restrict its own actions and obey its own restrictions.

Curtis Yarvin
In other words, our so-called democracy is dependent not on the wisdom of the people, but on the internal power politics of the official church. If these politics produce a political platform which translates to responsible and effective actions, the government will be good. If they don't, it will suck. Either way, we have consigned the state to an unaccountable conclave of bishops. Why this is an improvement on monarchy, or any other form of autocracy, is unclear.
This political architecture, an abortion by any standard, is commonly known as a theocracy. Oddly enough, the classic historical case of a theocracy is… wait, hang on, I'm forgetting… oh, yes! Right here, in North America. Under those strange people we call the "Puritans".

Curtis Yarvin
In fact, natural selection tends to favor the ascent of ideologies which not only are ineffective, but actually iatrogenic. In other words, the solution is actually causing the problem it purports to be trying to solve.

Curtis Yarvin
Academic politics is a murky and brutal game, and a small finger on the scales can steer it quite effectively, especially over time.

Curtis Yarvin
A good test for whether or not anything should continue to exist: if it didn't exist, would anyone invent it?

Curtis Yarvin
Are we really to believe that Marx, on his own, invented the idea that all men are brothers, despite living in a society dominated by a religion whose creed taught exactly that?

Curtis Yarvin
Men fight because they expect to win. Period. When they know they'll lose, they surrender.

Curtis Yarvin
The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology.

Curtis Yarvin
[…] the modern world has largely replaced religion, defined as the veneration of paranormal beings, with idealism, defined as the veneration of mysterious universal principles.

Curtis Yarvin
A good way to find the most powerful people in the US is to find the most responsible people. No one in the US is scheming for power. A lot of them seem to be working for change. No one in the US is brainwashing the masses. A lot of them seem to be educating the public. No one in the US is ruling the world. A lot of them seem to be making global policies.

Curtis Yarvin
The genius of New Deal "liberal democracy" is that while it's somewhat liberal, it's not at all democratic. It is in fact designed specifically to resist democracy. The combination of this design with a civic creed that assigns unlimited positive connotations to the word democracy is simply brilliant. We may despise it, but we have to admire it.

Curtis Yarvin
One of the classical symptoms of decadence is that young aristocrats spend all their time on political scheming, and it'd be hard to say we don't see this now.

Curtis Yarvin
Economically, a fiat monetary system works exactly the same as a metallic monetary system in which the sovereign owns an infinite gold mine.

Curtis Yarvin