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Quote by Oswald Spengler

Work

The Decline of the West...: Form and actuality

This book delves into the complexities of Western civilization's evolution, examining the factors contributing to its perceived decline. It offers a critical examination of cultural, political, and social trends, providing a nuanced perspective on the future of the West. more

Author

Oswald Spengler
Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler was a German philosopher and historian, born on May 29, 1880, and died on May 8, 1936. He is best known for his work 'The Decline of the West', which proposed a theory of cultural cycles, suggesting that civilizations and cultures follow a cycle of growth, maturity, and decline. more

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“Long, 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.”