Curtis Yarvin Quotes

184 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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
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
The charge that universities are directly responsible for almost all the violence in the world today […] strikes me as essentially accurate.

Curtis Yarvin
Iraq simply cannot be governed by a military effort, no matter how technically advanced, well-trained, and well-funded, that thinks of itself as a combination of a SWAT team and the Salvation Army.

Curtis Yarvin
If we want to end the era of chaos, democracy, and revolution, we need to deal squarely with the poisonous legacy of the Puritans.

Curtis Yarvin
Power drives thought. Seize power and thought will change itself. When the Allies conquered Germany in 1945, all Germans were Nazis. It took the occupation authorities no time at all to replace Nazi jargon with liberal jargon. It took about twenty years before the change was sincere. Now Germany is the most liberal nation in the world. In 1933, of course, the Nazis pulled the same trick in the same way. And this is just the twentieth century. Cuius regio, eius religio is a much older rule.

Curtis Yarvin
But the libertarian artillery officer faces a serious moral dilemma. Does artillery violate the natural rights of the target? I would say: the entire purpose of artillery is to violate the natural rights of the target. Clearly, if you could get your hands on the people your artillery is pointed at, and subject them to a full and fair judicial trial for whatever their offenses may be, you would have no need at all for artillery. Since you have no means by which to achieve this, you subject them to a 120-mm shell instead. Hence violating their natural rights—with both blast and shrapnel. When they may have committed no offenses at all.

Curtis Yarvin
The Left cannot be appeased. It can only be smashed.

Curtis Yarvin
Someday Westerners will learn that what matters about a government is what it does, and what doesn't matter is the race, creed, color, sexual preference, or country of origin of its employees. Unfortunately, I suspect we may have to learn it the hard way.

Curtis Yarvin
The Western governments of 2008 are red-giant states: they are as large as they have ever been, but also as weak as they have ever been.

Curtis Yarvin
Fairness is unachievable. Any distribution of rights will be perceived by someone as unfair. If it starts as equal, it will not long remain so. If you try to set it back, you can only do so by breaking the law.

Curtis Yarvin
The First Republic was the Congressional regime, which illegally abolished the British colonial governments. The Second Republic was the Constitutional regime, which illegally abolished the Articles of Confederation. The Third Republic was the Unionist regime, which illegally abolished the principle of federalism. The Fourth Republic is the New Deal regime, which illegally abolished the principle of limited government.

Curtis Yarvin
It is a commonly held misconception that elected politicians hold any significant power in the current Western system of government. At best they represent figureheads around which power coalesces, and you can follow the power by following the name, as if it were a small and dusty bobber attached to a large and energetic fish.

Curtis Yarvin
Democracy was not a movement of peasants and artisans. It was a movement on behalf of peasant and artisans. Communism was not a movement of workers. It was a movement on behalf of workers. Civil rights was not a movement of African-Americans. It was a movement on behalf of African-Americans. If the only people who had supported these movements were the designated sufferers themselves, none of us would ever have heard of any of them.

Curtis Yarvin
The free market isn't something that just happens. It needs to be designed and invented. The past is at best an inspiration.

Curtis Yarvin
The war in Iraq is an American civil war by proxy. The real prize of this war is political power in the United States. If the US military wins, the Republicans win. If the US military loses, the Democrats win. We saw the exact same thing in Vietnam, and given that, in general, the Republicans are the Democrats' punching bag, the result is pretty inevitable.

Curtis Yarvin