Oswald Spengler
Oswald Spengler
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spenglerwas a German historian and philosopher of history whose interests included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West, published in 1918 and 1922, covering all of world history. Spengler's civilization model postulates that any civilization is a superorganism with a limited and predictable lifespan...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth29 May 1880
CountryGermany
war desire facts
Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals.
army play soldier
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.
eye men suffering
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.
path outbreaks socialist
Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.
party ideas together
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.
spiritual soul doers
Every action alters the soul of the doer.
eye one-day gone
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.
leader facts movement
There is no proletarian, not even a Communist movement, that has not operated in the interests of money, and for the time being permitted by money - and that without the idealists among its leaders having the slightest suspicion of the fact.
war long soul
If few can stand a long war without deterioration of soul, none can stand a long peace.
bears extensions
History is direction—but Nature is extension—ergo, everyone gets eaten by a bear.
reality history imagination
History is that form which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality.
writing important matter
It doesn't really matter what one writes into a constitution. The important thing is what the collective instinct eventually makes of it.
transition cosmic tension
Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness
giving wish logic
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