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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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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
Takes
Whatever
History
Something
Notice
Expectations
Learned

More quotes by 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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All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.
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.
Oswald Spengler
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Optimism is cowardice.
Oswald Spengler
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You are caught in the current of unceasing change. Your life is a ripple in it. Every moment of your conscious life links the infinite past with the infinite future. Take part in both and you will not find the present empty.
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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Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.
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.
Oswald Spengler
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Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.
Oswald Spengler
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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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When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard 'having children' as a question of pro's and con's, the great turning point has come.
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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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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Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.
Oswald Spengler
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A resolute leader who collects ten thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes.
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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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 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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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