Top 70 Oswald Spengler Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals.”

— Oswald Spengler

2. “Fortunately, at the last hour, there were always a few soldiers to save Civilization.”

— Oswald Spengler

3. “Optimism is cowardice.”

— Oswald Spengler

4. “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

5. “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

6. “Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect.”

— Oswald Spengler

7. “Pacifism will remain an ideal, war a fact, and if the White race decides to wage it no longer, the dark ones will, and will become the masters of the world.”

— Oswald Spengler

8. “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

9. “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

10. “Those who talk too much about race no longer have it in them.”

— Oswald Spengler

11. “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

12. “Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism.”

— Oswald Spengler

13. “To-day a democrat of the old school would demand, not freedom for the press, but freedom from the press; but mean-time the leaders have changed themselves into parvenus who have to secure their position vis-a-vis the masses.”

— Oswald Spengler

14. “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

15. “Every action alters the soul of the doer.”

— Oswald Spengler

16. “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

17. “Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.”

— Oswald Spengler

18. “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

19. “Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes.”

— Oswald Spengler

20. “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

21. “Philosophy, the love of Wisdom, is at the very bottom defence against the incomprehensible.”

— Oswald Spengler

22. “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

23. “What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears.”

— Oswald Spengler

24. “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.”

— Oswald Spengler

25. “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

26. “History is direction – but Nature is extension – ergo, everyone gets eaten by a bear.”

— Oswald Spengler

27. “We Germans will never produce another Goethe, but we may produce another Caesar.”

— Oswald Spengler

28. “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

29. “If few can stand a long war without deterioration of soul, none can stand a long peace.”

— Oswald Spengler

30. “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

31. “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

32. “We have learned that history is something that takes no notice whatever of our expectations.”

— Oswald Spengler

33. “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

34. “At all times and in all places, the men and women of every culture deserve each other.”

— Oswald Spengler

35. “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.”

— Oswald Spengler

36. “All world-improvers are Socialists. And consequently there are no Classical world-improvers.”

— Oswald Spengler

37. “Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness.”

— Oswald Spengler

38. “One cannot learn how to be creative by reading Marx. Either one is creative or one is not.”

— Oswald Spengler

39. “At the beginning a man was wealthy because he was powerful – now he is powerful because he has money. Intellect reaches the throne only when money puts it there. Democracy is the completed equating of money with political power.”

— Oswald Spengler

40. “The very word “discovery” has something bluntly un-Classical in it. Classical man took good care not to take the cover, the material wrapping, off anything cosmic, but to do just this is the most characteristic impulse of a Faustian nature.”

— Oswald Spengler

41. “I maintain that many an inventor, many a diplomat, many a financier is a sounder philosopher than all those who practice the dull craft of experimental psychology.”

— Oswald Spengler

42. “Leben ist Tun und Leiden. Je wissender ein Mensch, desto tiefer sein seelisches Leid.”

— Oswald Spengler

43. “When the Englishman speaks of national wealth he means the number of millionaires in the country.”

— Oswald Spengler

44. “The decline of the West, which at first sight may appear, like the corresponding decline of the Classical Culture, a phenomenon limited in time and space, we now perceive to be a philosophical problem that, when comprehended in all its gravity, includes within itself every great question of Being.”

— Oswald Spengler

45. “A beast of prey tamed and in captivity – every zoological garden can furnish examples – is mutilated, world-sick, inwardly dead. Some of them voluntarily hunger-strike when they are captured. Herbivores give up nothing in being domesticated.”

— Oswald Spengler

46. “The primitive man experiences “soul,” first in other men and then in himself, as a Numen, just as he knows numina of the outer world, and develops his impressions in mythological form. His words for these things are symbols, sounds, not descriptive of the indescribable but indicative of it for him who hath ears to hear.”

— Oswald Spengler

47. “Once upon a time, Freedom and Necessity were identical; but now what is understood by freedom is in fact indiscipline.”

— Oswald Spengler

48. “We no longer believe in the power of reason over life. We feel that it is life which dominates reason.”

— Oswald Spengler

49. “Let a man be either a hero or a saint. In between lies, not wisdom, but banality.”

— Oswald Spengler

50. “Man is an element of all-living nature that rises in rebellion against nature. He will pay for this defiance with his life. Through this act of defiance, man distinguishes himself from all other living things, which as pure nature are blended into the tapestry of the natural universe. Mankind is the hero of this tragedy, world history the final act of the tragedy itself.”

— Oswald Spengler