Quotes from Ernst Junger

La mécanisation de l'homme avait fait de l'Europe un désert.

The Romans were different: they dealt in hard facts, allowing everyone to form his own opinion. For example, it made no difference to them whether the Jews believed in the Twelve Gods; the Romans nailed no theses on the portals of the Temple of Zion; they merely erected a statue of Caesar in front of it.

I am an anarch in space, a metahistorian in time. Hence I am committed to neither the political present nor tradition; I am blank and also open and potent in any direction.

We had come from lecture halls, school desks and factory workbenches, and over the brief weeks of training, we had bonded together into one large and enthusiastic group. Grown up in an age of security, we shared a yearning for danger, for the experience of the extraordinary. We were enraptured by war.

Discipline had vanished from the world.It had been replaced by the catastrophe.We were living in permament unrest,and no one could trust anyone else.

The suspicion that there are invisible things, things that seldom appear or that are only shown to the chosen ones, had to be preceded by the knowledge of the visible things, that is, of experience. This provides the grip.

Even if ten out of twelve men had fallen, the two survivors would surely meet over a glass on their first evening off, and drink a silent toast to their comrades, and jestingly talk over their shared experiences. There was in these men a quality of both emphasized the savagery of war and transfigured it at the same time: an objective relish for danger, the chevaleresque urge to prevail in battle.

It has always been my ideal in war to eliminate all feelings of hatred and to treat my enemy as an enemy only in battle and to honour him as a man according to his courage.

The more the panic grows, the more uplifting the image of a man who refuses to bow to the terror.

The special trait making me an anarch is that I live in a world which I 'ultimately' do not take seriously. This increases my freedom; I serve as a temporary volunteer