"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 29 May 1880 – 8 May 1936

Oswald Spengler was a German historian and philosopher of history whose interests included mathematics, science, and art and their relation to his cyclical theory of history. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West (1918), covering all of world history.

Spengler's model of history postulates that any culture is a superorganism with a limited and predictable lifespan.

He strongly influenced other historians, including Franz Borkenau and especially Arnold J. Toynbee and other successors like Carroll Quigley and Samuel P. Huntington.

"Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect."

~ Oswald Spengler

"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

"We have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time..."

~ Oswald Spengler

"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..."
~ Spengler

"Socialism is nothing but the capitalism of the lower classes."

~ Oswald Spengler

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

~ Oswald Spengler

"Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama...

The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed."

~ Oswald Spengler

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

~ Oswald Spengler

"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

"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