Oswald Spengler Quotes

“What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears.”

— Oswald Spengler

“The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.”

— Oswald Spengler

Optimism is cowardice.

— Oswald Spengler

“To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery(the media) 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

“Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.”

— Oswald Spengler

“Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect.”

— Oswald Spengler

“History is direction-but Nature is extension-ergo, everyone gets eaten by a bear.”

— Oswald Spengler

“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

“Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.”

— Oswald Spengler

“Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.”

— Oswald Spengler

“The question of whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals ...”

— Oswald Spengler

“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

“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

“Talk of world peace is heard today only among the white peoples, and not among the much more numerous coloured races. This is a perilous state of affairs. When individual thinkers and idealists talk of peace, as they have done since time immemorial, the effect is negligible. But when whole peoples become pacifistic it is a symptom of senility. Strong and unspent races are not pacifistic. To adopt such a position is to abandon the future, for the pacifist ideal is a terminal condition that is contrary to the basic facts of existence. As long as man continues to evolve, there will be wars ...”

— Oswald Spengler

“For the Age has itself become vulgar, and most people have no idea to what extent they are themselves tainted. The bad manners of all parliaments, the general tendency to connive at a rather shady business transaction if it promises to bring in money without work, jazz and Negro dances as the spiritual outlet in all circles of society, women painted like prostitutes, the efforts of writers to win popularity by ridiculing in their novels and plays the correctness of well-bred people, and the bad taste shown even by the nobility and old princely families in throwing off every kind of social restraint and time-honoured custom: all of these go to prove that it is now the vulgar mob that gives the tone.”

— Oswald Spengler

All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.

— Oswald Spengler

“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

“Philosophy, the love of Wisdom, is at the very bottom defence against the incomprehensible.”

— Oswald Spengler

Man makes history; woman is history. The reproduction of the species is feminine: it runs steadily and quietly through all species, animal or human, through all short-lived cultures. It is primary, unchanging, everlasting, maternal, plantlike, and cultureless. If we look back we find that it is synonymous with life itself.

— Oswald Spengler

“When the Englishman speaks of national wealth he means the number of millionaires in the country.”

— Oswald Spengler

“World-history is the history of the great Cultures, and peoples are but the symbolic forms and vessels in which the men of these Cultures fulfil their Destinies.”

— Oswald Spengler

“Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness”

— Oswald Spengler

“If few can stand a long war without deterioration of soul, none can stand a long peace.”

— Oswald Spengler

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

Suddenly all those individuals who yesterday felt that "we" meant only their families, their professions, or perhaps their communities, become men of the nation. Their emotions and thoughts, their egos, that "something" within them, all are transformed: they have become historical.

— Oswald Spengler

“We have learned that history is something that takes no notice whatever of our expectations.”

— Oswald Spengler

“A thinker is a person whose part it is to symbolize time according to his vision and understanding. He has no choice; he thinks as he has to think.”

— Oswald Spengler

By understanding the world I mean being equal to the world. It is the hard reality of living that is the essential, not the concept of life, that the ostrich philosophy of idealism propounds.

— Oswald Spengler

“Nature is the shape in which the man of higher Cultures synthesizes and interprets the immediate impressions of his senses. History is that from which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality.”

— Oswald Spengler

Unalert yet sometimes suffused through and through by an inward light, is characteristic of the primitive and of the child (and also of those moments of religious and artistic inspiration that occur ever less and less often as a Culture grows older) right

— Oswald Spengler

“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 think, and this they consider freedom.”

— Oswald Spengler

“Pacifism means letting the non-pacifists have control ... Pacifism will remain an ideal, war a fact. If the white races are resolved never to wage war again, the colored will act differently and become rulers of the world.”

— Oswald Spengler

“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

Pacifism will remain an ideal, war a fact, and if the White race decides to wage it no longer, the dark ones will, and will become the masters of the world.

— Oswald Spengler

“It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.”

— Oswald Spengler

“One does not reflect on a point of honor - that is already dishonor. To submit to insult, to forget a humiliation, to quail before an enemy - all these are signs of a life become worthless and superfluous.”

— Oswald Spengler

“At last, in the gray dawn of Civilization the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism in the womb of the mother in the grave.”

— Oswald Spengler

“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

“Every action alters the soul of the doer.”

— Oswald Spengler

“Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them.”

— Oswald Spengler

“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

“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

“It doesn't really matter what one writes into a constitution. The important thing is what the collective instinct eventually makes of it.”

— Oswald Spengler

“The individual's life is of importance to none besides himself: the point is whether he wishes to escape from history or give his life for it. History recks nothing of human logic”

— Oswald Spengler

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

“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

If you are clever enough to figure out what men want, you are either too wise to marry them or too intimidating for them to marry you.

— Oswald Spengler

“We Germans will never produce another Goethe, but we may produce another Caesar.”

— Oswald Spengler

“One cannot learn how to be creative by reading Marx. Either one is creative or one is not.”

— Oswald Spengler

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