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Optimism is cowardice.

Oswald Spengler

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Oswald Spengler
Age: 55 †
Born: 1880
Born: May 29
Died: 1936
Died: May 8
Historian
Mathematician
Philosopher
Sociologist
Writer
Blankenburg/Harz
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler
Cowardice
Optimism

More quotes by Oswald Spengler

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We Germans will never produce another Goethe, but we may produce another Caesar.
Oswald Spengler
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The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.
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When the Englishman speaks of national wealth he means the number of millionaires in the country.
Oswald Spengler
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If you are clever enough to figure out what men want, you are either too wise to marry them or too intimidating for them to marry you.
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The individual's life is of importance to none besides himself: the point is whether he wishes to escape from history or give his life for it. History recks nothing of human logic
Oswald Spengler
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Formerly no one was allowed to think freely now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.
Oswald Spengler
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Every action alters the soul of the doer.
Oswald Spengler
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One does not reflect on a point of honor - that is already dishonor. To submit to insult, to forget a humiliation, to quail before an enemy - all these are signs of a life become worthless and superfluous.
Oswald Spengler
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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.
Oswald Spengler
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It doesn't really matter what one writes into a constitution. The important thing is what the collective instinct eventually makes of it.
Oswald Spengler
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Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.
Oswald Spengler
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Peace is a desire, war is a fact and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals.
Oswald Spengler
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The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live--he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death.
Oswald Spengler
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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.
Oswald Spengler
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When three liberals get together they form a new party that is their idea of individualism. They never join a bowling club without introducing as part of the 'agenda' an 'amendment of the statutes.
Oswald Spengler
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One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be — though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain — because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone.
Oswald Spengler
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And the National Socialists believe that they can afford to ignore the world or oppose it, and build their castles-in-the-air without creating a possibly silent, but very palpable reaction from abroad.
Oswald Spengler
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The common man wants nothing of life but health, longevity, amusement, comfort-“happiness.” He who does not despise this should turn his eyes from world history, for it contains nothing of the sort. The best that history has created is great suffering.
Oswald Spengler
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We have learned that history is something that takes no notice whatever of our expectations.
Oswald Spengler
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All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.
Oswald Spengler