Curtis Yarvin Quotes

184 Sourced Quotes

Stability is much underappreciated, especially by those who enjoy its benefits.

Curtis Yarvin
Limited government simply has no motivation to stay limited. And so it doesn't.

Curtis Yarvin
Democratic politics is best understood as a sort of symbolic violence, like deciding who wins the battle by how many troops they brought.

Curtis Yarvin
[…] every kind of human action has become shrouded in a vast cloud of something called "ethics", which no one can define, but no one is allowed to question. An actual holy book would be a serious improvement.

Curtis Yarvin
I am a Carlylean. I'm a Carlylean more or less the way a Marxist is a Marxist. My worship of Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian Jesus, is no adolescent passion—but the conscious choice of a mature adult. I will always be a Carlylean, just the way a Marxist will always be a Marxist.

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
And the Left, in power, must pretend to contend against some great, imagined enemy, which it naturally models on itself.

Curtis Yarvin
Here we meet a good old friend, martial law—yet another traditional attribute of sovereignty recognized for millennia, yet strangely forgotten in the late twentieth century. Martial law is no law at all, of course, but the arbitrary will of a military commander. It is really martial order. And there are countries in the world—quite a few, in fact—that need martial order, the way a camel that's just walked across Libya needs a glass of water.

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

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

Curtis Yarvin
[…] the continuity of tradition from Plymouth Rock to the United Nations is quite unmistakable.

Curtis Yarvin
[…] in a free society, there is no such thing as official truth.

Curtis Yarvin
In fact, rationalism is to reason as scientism is to science.

Curtis Yarvin
The history of ideas since 1789 is an endless record of mass murder in the name of the people.

Curtis Yarvin
Conflict is an inescapable part of life. Uncertainty is not.

Curtis Yarvin
All decent, reasonable men are horrified by the idea that the government might control the press.
None of them seem concerned at all that the press might control the government.

Curtis Yarvin
In any responsible position, no formula or computer (given present technology) can replace human decisions, because no formula can exhibit wisdom or exercise judgment. These essentially human qualities are essential for any responsible position, but most of all in the most responsible position of all: sovereign command.
And all organizations, big or small, public or private, military or civilian, are managed best when managed by a single executive. Hence: royalism. However he or she is selected, the title of such an executive, in a sovereign capacity, is King—or, at least, anything else is a euphemism. And why trade in euphemisms?

Curtis Yarvin
The artists of today produce kitsch because they're rebelling against a fictitious power structure by supporting a real one.

Curtis Yarvin
Therefore, to establish any stability, the democratic State must manage public opinion. This is also known as manufacturing consent, and it typically involves a substantial system of official or quasiofficial education and/or journalism.
So a good way to see which faction holds real power in a democratic state is to look at which can get its people into influential roles in education and/or journalism.

Curtis Yarvin
To a true libertarian, "classical liberalism" is a moral imperative, not a prudent policy. To me, it is just a prudent policy, and it is only a prudent policy in those cases where it does not turn out to be imprudent.

Curtis Yarvin
How do you anesthetize a population? When it reacts normally, convince it that it's being hysterical.

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

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
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