“Thus after a series of bright days, often comes indefinite weather, and then a morning of particular clarity heralds the great climatic shift, when all the mountains and the valleys once again reveal themselves in their full splendour. Good prose is like wine; it lives on afterwards much like wine after it is pressed. There are sentences that are not yet true, but a mysterious life imbues them with truth. Fresh prose may still be a bit raw, but over the years it gains patina. I often notice this in old letters.

1/ From the various revivals of a suspect mysticism to the introduction of always more counterfeit exotic doctrines; from the newest spiritualistic superstition to the morbid interest in the problems and complications of the unconscious and psychoanalysis; from Intuitionism and 2/ Surrealism to the various messianic forms & to pseudo-religious & pseudo-occultists of the 1700s that swarmed at the margins of Protestantism; from humanitarian and universalistic ideologies to those of a Religion of Life and a Superman who, strange to say, almost always ends

1/ It is necessary to take a stand against everything which serves only to trigger a sort of chronic obsession with sex & women, & which ultimately represents a systematic, wide-scale attack against virile values: 2/ for wherever love & sex predominate, it will always be womankind that, in some way or other, predominates. This obsession is nourished in a thousand ways by means that are not, strictly speaking, ‘obscene’, such as the images in magazines, ads and films, beauty pageants,

1/ In Judaism, the law takes over the function of all of those principles. To the point that if the Jews are liberated from the law, they automatically become a factor of dissolution. Thus, themselves without race, Jews then become the anti-race; 2/ themselves without a nation, they become the anti-nation. Mommsen wrote: “Already in the ancient world, Judaism was a ferment of cosmopolitanism and national decomposition.” An elusive, evasive, and rootless substance within any country,

1/ In a Talmudic text, we read: “Wherever the Jews settle, they must become bosses; and as long as they will not have absolute power, they will consider themselves exiles, prisoners . . . as long as they do not dominate entirely, they ought never to stop crying: What torment! 2/ how unworthy!” Once again, that is a theme of the Law, derived from the ancient Promise that, once its religious justification had been forgotten, left its trace in the form of a revolutionary instinct acting independently as a ferment of agitation and continuous subversion.

1/ That the true Jew is as anti-traditional, with respect to the other peoples of the milieu in which he is, as he is tenaciously attached to what is peculiar to his people and to his tradition, is as singular a paradox as it is instructive. 2/ The question therefore is whether the humanitarian and democratic sermons of Judaism are only forms of well-thought-out hypocrisy, in the sense that the freedom dreamt of by the Jew within the leveled and fraternalistic world of the Masonic-liberal ideals, and such milieus,

1/ Present Western “civilization” awaits a substantial upheaval (rivolgimento), without which it is destined, sooner or later, to smash its own head. It has carried out the most complete perversion of the rational order of things. Reign of matter, gold, machines, numbers; 2/ in this civilization there is no longer breath or liberty or light. The West has lost its ability to command and to obey. It has lost its feeling for contemplation and action. It has lost its feeling for values, spiritual power, godlike men (uomini-iddii).

1/ The individualist ethic undoubtedly corresponds to a condition of the mixing of peoples and stocks, to the same extent that the ethos of being oneself corresponds to a state of prevalent racial purity. Where races are mixed, vocations become confused, it becomes more & more 2/ difficult to see clearly into one’s own being, and inner instability, which is a sign of a lack of true roots, increases. Race-mixing promotes the emergence and reinforcement of the consciousness of man as “individual,” and it also favors activities that are “free,” “creative”

1/ True dominion comes by rising oneself to that which is superior to that which one wishes to dominate: one cannot have it by remaining on the same level. A hand as a hand cannot claim to have the power to dominate the other organs of the body. 2/ It can do so only by ceasing to be a hand, making itself into soul—that is by elevating itself to the unitary and immaterial function which is called to unify and to rule the various particularistic corporeal functions.

1/ The modern world has by and large traveled the . . . path of the systematic neglect of one’s own nature, the path of individualism, of restlessness and social climbing. Here, the ideal is no longer to be what one is, but to “construct” oneself, 2/ to involve oneself in all kinds of activities, randomly, or for completely utilitarian reasons; no longer to actuate one’s own being with serious consistency, loyalty and purity, but to use all of one’s strength to become what one is not.

1/ In a different field, another manifestation of the taste for vulgarity is the fashion of “screaming” singers, unfortunately widespread in Italy. The tendency is the same. One takes pleasure in descending to the level of the street, of the marketplace: 2/ the primitivism of the vulgar voice, at best an almost animal instinctiveness in expression and emotion. Another aspect of the same phenomenon are the ecstasies that white men and women for some time now have been sent into by the raucous and graceless singing of the Negro,

1/ The individualist ethic undoubtedly corresponds to a condition of the mixing of peoples and stocks, to the same extent that the ethos of being oneself corresponds to a state of prevalent racial purity. Where races are mixed, vocations become confused, it becomes more and more 2/ difficult to see clearly into one’s own being, & inner instability, which is a sign of a lack of true roots, increases. Race-mixing promotes the emergence and reinforcement of the consciousness of man as “individual,” and it also favors activities that are “free,” “creative”

1/ The fundamental meaning of every civilisation was that of a victory of form over the formless, of the ‘cosmos’ over the ‘chaos’. Thus, at the centre of the classical vision of life & of the State we characteristically find precisely the cult and the valorisation of the limit, 2/ of the form, of difference, of the clear personality. The world is ‘cosmos’ and not ‘chaos’ to the extent that it, like a harmonious living organism, is constituted by a whole of finite parts, each of which has a precise function, proper to it and unmistakable in the whole;

1/ Class has nothing to do with caste, it has no organic and traditional basis, but is instead an artificial social grouping, determined by extrinsic factors which are almost always of a materialistic nature. Class almost always arises on an individualistic basis, in the sense 2/ that it is the “place” that brings together all those who, through their enterprise, have climbed to the same social position, in complete independence of what they by nature truly are. These artificial groupings then tend to crystallize, thereby generating the tensions known

1/ The Awakened One is he who is detached from life and death and who knows the way up and the way down, he is “bold, not knowing hesitation, a sure leader, pure of passion, resplendent as the light of the sun, resplendent without arrogance, heroic”; 2/ he is the Knower “whom no mania dazzles, no trouble conquers, no victory tempts, no spot stains”; he's one “who asks no more, & who, as a man, has mastered the ascetic art”: he is the “great being, who lives strenuously, free from every bond, no longer slave to any servitude”;

1/ The men of the new arrangement will still be anti-bourgeois, but by way of the aforesaid higher heroic and aristocratic conception of existence; they will be anti-bourgeois because they disdain the comfortable life; 2/ anti-bourgeois because they will follow not those who promise material advantages, but those who demand everything from themselves; anti-bourgeois, finally, because they are not preoccupied with security but love the essential union between life and risk, on all planes,

1/ The main characteristic of “intelligent stupidity” is the absence of principles, of interests in higher matters, and of genuine commitment, while its supreme concern is to be “brilliant” and “original,” attaching great importance to slick and professional “good writing,” 2/ to everything that is form and not substance, to esprit in the frivolous and urbane French sense. For the representatives of this “intelligentsia,” the brilliant sentence, the dialectical and polemical statement, have much more value than truth. Ideas,

1/ After centuries of "slavery" women wanted to be themselves and to do whatever they pleased. But so-called feminism has not been able to devise a personality for women other than by imitating the male personality, so that the woman's "claims" conceal a fundamental lack of trust 2/ in herself as well as her inability to be and to function as a real woman and not as a man. Due to such a misunderstanding, the modern woman has considered her traditional role to be demeaning and has taken offense at being treated "only as a woman."

1/ The modern world that's taking shape doesn't know Prometheus unbound in a positive sense, which's to say the Prometheus who's been unbound by Heracles (he who in Antiquity embodied man, the hero, who has made the other choice, that of allying himself with the Olympian powers). 2/ The modern world only knows the Prometheus who has been unchained & allowed to go his own way, to bask in his misery & in the tragedy of a merely human existence—or, rather, an existence regarded from a merely human perspective.

1/ Just as there is a physical and biological heredity, there is also a psychic and spiritual one, which in traditional societies justified the principle of exclusion and caste that seems so intolerable to the demagogy and individualism of our day. 2/ Just as an animal does not become domesticated at a stroke, thus aristocratic tradition only won its effective and objective value through the slow and steady acquisition, conservation, and preservation of subtle dispositions on the basis of an influence from above,

1/ For thousands of years racism has been active in the gentile nobility of every people, and even in its highest form, insofar as it has maintained its adherence to the idea of tradition and avoided materializing in the form of a kind of zoology. 2/ Before the concept of race was generalized, as it has been in current times, having race was always synonymous with aristocracy. The qualities of race always signified the qualities of the elite, and referred not to gifts of genius, of culture or of intellect,