Oswald Spengler

The purest symbol of an understanding that has again got beyond language is the old peasant couple sitting in the evening in front of their cottage and entertaining one another without a word’s being passed, each knowing what the other is thinking and feeling. Words would only disturb the harmony.

when after 1789 the notion of mother tongue came to be fitted on to the dynastic principle, the once merely scientific fancy of a primitive Indogermanic people transformed itself into a deeply felt genealogy of “the Aryan race,” and in the process the word “race” became almost a designation for Destiny.

Universal human rights, freedom, and equality are literature and abstraction and not facts.

Every people has such (historically speaking) waste products. Even their heads constitute physiognomically a group by themselves. In the “history of intellect” they stand high — and many illustrious names are numbered amongst them — but regarded from the point of view of actual history, they are inefficients.

“Lever doodt als Sklav (better dead than slave)” is an old Frisian peasant saying. The reverse has been the choice of every Late Civilization, and every Late Civilization has had to experience how much that choice costs it.

No one starts a war, or a goes to sea, or even takes a walk without thinking of its duration and its ending. Every truly creative human being knows and fears the emptiness that follows upon the fulfilment of a work.

But history, of old as well as today, is the history of war.