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 SpenglerRead
If few can stand a long war without deterioration of soul, none can stand a long peace.
Interpretation
Long periods of war or peace can deteriorate one's spirit or essence.
This quote by Oswald Spengler suggests that enduring long periods of conflict can wear down a person's soul, but he argues that the challenges associated with prolonged peace can be equally, if not more, damaging. It reflects on the human condition and how external circumstances, whether strife or tranquility, can deeply impact our internal state and moral integrity.
In practice
During a public debate on the effects of recent conflicts, this quote can illustrate the challenges of societal scars left by prolonged warfare.
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
In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.
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.
Every Socialist outbreak only blazes new paths for Capitalism.
It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.
Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect.
For me, socialism has always been about liberty and solidarity, but also about responsibility.
Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.
To recommend a monarchy on account of the prosperity it gives the provinces seems to me like recommending that a man should have liberty to treat his children as slaves, if at the same time he treats his slaves with reasonable consideration.
The true cost to the world of a burger is far greater than the money you hand over to buy it.
Those who call themselves anti-Zionists usually insist they are not anti-Semites. But I struggle to see what else to call an ideology that seeks to eradicate only one state in the world - the one that happens to be the Jewish one - while empathetically insisting on the rights of self-determination for every other minority.
The most familiar precepts are not always the truest.
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