Quotes About Spengler

with large trunk full of highbrow books (Spengler etc.)', and Pound read The Decline of the West 'in return for tips on XV century'. He told his father that 'As S. seems to mean by "The West" a lot of things I dislike, I shd. like to accept his infantine belief that they are "declining"';

the importance of preserving the integrity of a non-scientific form of understanding, the kind of understanding characteristic of the arts and the kind of understanding that Goethe, Spengler and Wittgenstein sought to protect from the encroachment of science and scientism.

Spengler tells how the Greeks never knew introspection [. . .]. He designates this as a Faustian malady. He is too fond of the Faustian soul, Spengler, did you notice? But how magnificently he writes about de Vinci, the painter I love best.

Have been reading Spengler exultantly. I never expected to experience such a sense of wonder, of vastness and richness.

Reading Decline of the West I learned that in Spenglers view ours was a Faustian civilization and that we, the Jews, were Magians, the survivors and representatives of an earlier type, totally incapable of comprehending the Faustian spirit that had created the great civilization of the West. ... What Magians were to Faustians, Faustians might very well be to Americans.

Spengler] made peace with contemporary Germany, not with the Nazis, for I know of no one who hated them as he did, on lying down, in sleeping, and in rising up!

The forgotten Spengler will have his revenge by threatening to be right in the end. (...) Spengler has hardly found an opponent worthy of him: collective amnesia provides the escape.

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

Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.

Siento que también hay algo en mí que hace una mueca de resignación, que algo en mí se crispa contra Nada, porque Dios y Destino y Materialismo Dialéctico son meros slogans que lanzaron Abraham y Spengler y Marx, no precisamente para formarnos o transformarnos o conformarnos, sino para hacernos olvidar de las únicas metas razonables y obligatorias, verbigracia el suicidio o la locura.

Optimism is cowardice. We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end.

It is one of the greatest achievements of Nietzsche that he confronted science with the problem of the

Nature is to be handeled scientifically, History poetically. Everything else is an impure solution.

The question of how to either play an active role in a Western tragedy entering its final act, or to lamentably perish as a passive victim of the universal mechanisation that is to be its general theme, is at the heart of the present volume by Oswald Spengler entitled Man and Technics, originally published in 1931.