Curtis Yarvin Quotes

184 Sourced Quotes

I'm quite happy to be an anti-intellectual, actually. It is the modern equivalent of anticlericalism, and it is long overdue. One can oppose specific institutions without opposing thought in general. In fact, sometimes it is even necessary.

Curtis Yarvin
You get rid of the system by making it fashionable, among the most fashionable people, to believe the system needs to be gotten rid of. It is certainly possible to build a system of government that can withstand, in a purely military sense, the disapproval of its own elites, but such is not the case with ours.

Curtis Yarvin
An alien perspective is useful because it is not, at least not obviously, influenced by the ideas that are loose in the world today.

Curtis Yarvin
[…] nothing corrupt, criminal, or mendacious can be described as reactionary.

Curtis Yarvin
In a society where scholars are the ruling caste, actual scholarship tends to disappear.

Curtis Yarvin
[…] a free, prosperous democratic society is like a person who's so strong and healthy he can take a dose of arsenic every day—or at least, every four years—and still survive, sort of. The free, prosperous democratic society might be remarkably unfree and unprosperous compared to an undemocratic society that never took the arsenic, but so few of the latter survived the last two centuries that we have no basis for comparison.

Curtis Yarvin
The most powerful people in the West today, measured strictly by their ability to influence the real world, are journalists and professors.

Curtis Yarvin
For obvious reasons of human psychology, journalists […] are likely to favor political systems in which they themselves are more important and powerful.

Curtis Yarvin
[…] the undemocratic, tyrannous societies are not those which failed to take the democratic arsenic, but those which took it and found it fatal.

Curtis Yarvin
The definition of a sovereign is that a sovereign is above the law. Its will is its own law.

Curtis Yarvin
There is no institution to which one can go in order to receive a sound paleoconservative education. Most of the people in the idea trade would simply deny that such a thing exists. Safeway will sell you a whole, salted rhinoceros head before Harvard will teach you that Lincoln was a tyrant.

Curtis Yarvin
[…] if there is any constant in history, it is that philosophers are very bad at predicting the future. Even when the policies they propose are followed, the results tend to be quite different from predictions.

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

Curtis Yarvin
The entire intellectual system of the West was corrupted by its twentieth-century connection to government. Public opinion reflects press opinion, press opinion reflects academic politics, and academic politics are driven by power-struggles in which the attraction of the state is clear.
The victory of Keynesian over Misesian economics, for example, is a classic case of this. Theories of economics which led to jobs advising the state were adaptive. Theories which didn't weren't.

Curtis Yarvin
The way to do political, rather than cosmopolitical, economy is straightforward: consolidate the national balance sheet, treating the entire nation as a single corporation. Current account deficits then appear as losses. The notorious decay of nations which run a chronic trade deficit appears as a parallel with the notorious decay of corporations which run at a chronic loss.
Similarly, the old mercantilist strategy of accumulating precious metals—much mocked by Adam Smith—appears as no more than the accumulation of retained earnings by a profitable polity.

Curtis Yarvin
You think you're charging the matador, but you're charging the cape.

Curtis Yarvin
The [British] Empire had to die not because it didn't work, but because it worked too well. The quality of imperial rule was starting to present evidence against democracy herself.

Curtis Yarvin
To a Carlylean, the main event is the struggle between left and right. Which is the struggle between good and evil. Which is the struggle between order and chaos. Evil is chaos; good is order. Evil is left; good is right. Evil is fiction; good is truth.

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