Oswald Spengler

They oppose every kind of authority, because they wish to be responsible to no one, and themselves evade all responsibility. #Spengler

of which the gratification of vanity is the least harmful. They oppose the forces of tradition in order to set up themselves in its place. They oppose the State order, because it hampers their own form of activity.

Persons who designate themselves “representatives” of the people come along and recommend themselves as such. They have no intention whatever of “serving the people”; they intend to make the people serve them in their more or less sordid aims,

Oswald Spengler with his mother and sisters. One of the sisters, Adele, would commit suicide some time later, in 1917, when the English blockade of Germany was so harsh on the latter.

Oswald Spengler's parents, Bernhard and Pauline, with the baby Oswald.

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. #Spengler

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

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,

Entries from Spengler’s notebooks. Does anyone possibly have it?

It is nonsense, à la Ibsen and Nietzsche, to bring in the opposition between Christianity and paganism. It is a question of the opposition between nobility and priests. Both are priestly natures who envy the nobleman because he is a doer and not a brooder. #Spengler

the one not very explicit as a claim, but all the more effective as a fact; the other a truth, but nothing more than that and, as a spectacle for the eye, not very convincing. #Spengler

By way of protest against the ancient symbols of the soilbound life, the city opposes to the aristocracy of birth the notion of an aristocracy of money and an aristocracy of intellect—

Men are tired to disgust of money-economy. They hope for salvation from somewhere or other, for some real thing of honour and chivalry, of inward nobility, of unselfishness and duty. #Spengler

Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes in Julius Evola’s translation. It was published in 1957, Milan, in about 1573 pages.

A power can be overthrown only by another power, not by a principle, and no power that can confront money is left but this one. Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood. #Spengler

The blood and soul of the d layer is constantly replenished from c and is consumed. One can at any time regard the culture attained as a building which one person [inhabits] as belonging to, another hates, the third does not see at all. #Spengler

Lackeys, maids, the goat herder do not yet understand anything about it, but for other reasons. As a result of their upbringing—village education, church discipline—they remain on the c-level, which lives on underneath, as a foundation, also mentally.

What is culture? Culture is like a rich house. Children ‘see’ nothing of the precious furniture, tapestries, vases. They live in their own world. Only slowly do you grow into the culture of such a manor.

@Alex_of_SPQR You better calm down.

@Daily_Spengler Spengler should have shut his mouth and given himself time to think through better. His life's work is loaded with serious structural mistakes and amateur's hacks where borrowed or stolen concepts are made into his.

Not every person of a cultured people is a cultured person. Culture denotes a rank. Many have something of it, some traits, a touch. Individuals represent it completely—Goethe, Frederick II, Leonardo. #Spengler