Arthur Moeller van den Bruck

"The Revolution can never be un-made. A revolution may be combated while there is yet time while there is yet faith that help may be found for the nation in its need. Such help will most readily be found in the government which has hitherto been the nations best protector. But once a revolution has become a fact, there is nothing left for the thinking man but to accept it as a new datum, a new starting-point."

"Liberalism has taught the West to turn its principles into tactics to deceive the people. The west dubs this democracy, though it has become evident enough how ill men thrive on a political diet of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity."

"Marxism has in fact all the symptoms of a materialistic utopia. Marx credited the proletariat with the power to create a perpetuum mobile. Provided it was logically conceived 11 ought to be feasible. But the world itself is the perpetuum mobile. And Demiurgos allows no meddling with his job."

"Schiller long ago formulated the idealist conception of history, which secs in man a free moral agent, controlling nature. The materialists never got beyond the positivist point of view which confines history to an attempt to understand conditions, describe their phenomena and analyse their components. There is, however, another point of view possible: a metaphysical, which includes the physical, an intellectual, which includes the scientific: a point of view which recognizes the sublimity and rises above the degradation of man: the only point of view from which an answer is possible to the question: Who created the circumstances? It is no answer to reply that the circumstances created themselves. Marx never allowed himself to speculate whether perhaps materialism might not be merely a transition to some greater principle behind. He clung to the assertion that men make their own history, not as free agents, but under the compulsion of given circumstances. Again we ask: but who created the circumstances? There can only be one answer: Man himself is the datum."

"The German nation is astir. Its path is blocked. It has lost its bearings. It seeks space. It seeks work: and fails to find it. We are becoming a nation of proletarians."

"Every people has its own socialism."

"The principle of liberalism is to have no fixed principle and to contend that this is in itself a principle."

"The liberal has flourished at all periods. The nobody is always eager to imagine himself a somebody. The man who is a misfit in his own society is always a liberal out of amour propre. The disinterestedness of the conservative cherishes the sacredness of a cause that shall not die with him; the liberal says: Après moi, le déluge. Conservatism is rooted in the strength of man; liberalism battens on his weakness. The liberals conjuring trick consists in turning others weakness to his own account, living at other mens expense, and concealing his art with patter about ideals. This is the accusation against him. He has always been a source of gravest danger."

"All this was hailed as progress: but it spelt decay. The same process continues: the disciples of reason, the apostles of enlightenment, the heralds of progress are usually in the first generation great idealists, high-principled men, convinced of the importance of their discoveries and of the benefit these confer on man. But no later than the second generation the peculiar and unholy connection betrays itself which exists between materialist philosophy and nihilist interpretation. As at the touch of a conjurors wand the scientific theory of the atom reduces society to atoms."

"The English always talked of freedom. They always sought their own freedom at the expense of everyone elses. They early developed a peculiar mode of thought based on a confusion of ideas, which gave precedence not to a cause for its own sake but to the advantage they themselves derived from it. There was no hypocrisy in this: though it looked like hypocrisy. It was merely an incredible naivete combined with a natural brutality of approach. The English were perfectly unconscious of these things. Their trump card was their stupidity, and in their stupidity lay their highest shrewdness."

"Amongst the discoveries which reason made, the most fateful was this: that man is not free. It might well have seemed the most obviously reasonable thing to hedge this unfree man about with state conventions. Instead, the liberals demanded that this man-who was biologically unfree-should have perfect individual and political freedom."

"Our enemies have their present success. The moment is in their favour, but everything else is against them. The secret, however, must not be revealed before its time. What we can, however, already detect is a regrouping of men and nations. All anti-liberal forces are combining against everything that is liberal. We are living in the time of this transition. The change is taking place most logically from below and attacking the enemy where his power began. There is a revolt against the age of reason."