—Evola on Sport:

1/ Sport is a way of working in which the productive objective no longer matters; thus, sport is willed for its own sake as mere activity. Someone has rightly pointed out that sport is the “blue collar” religion. 2/ Sport is a typical counterfeit of action in the traditional sense of the word. A pointless activity, it is nevertheless still characterized by the same triviality of work and belongs to the same physical and lightless group of activities that are pursued at the various

—Evola on what an exhaustive racial theory should look like:

1/ One’s idea of race depends on one’s idea of man: the nature of each racial doctrine is determined by its conceptualization of the human being. All distortions in the field of racism derive from a materialist view of 2/ man, a view informed by science and naturalism. By contrast, at the very basis of my racial doctrine I placed the traditional idea of man as a being comprised of three elements: body, character and spirit. I argued that an exhaustive racial theory has to take all three

—Evola on the Peaks and the Suffocation of the Heroic in today’s Life:

1/ Everything in modern society tends to dampen the heroic sense of life. Everything moves toward mechanization, to the regulated and prudent community life of beings who are constantly in need of something, 2/ and not self-sufficient. Everything today tends to be reduced to the lower two of the four castes (the heroes, those who are initiated into wisdom, the merchants, and the workers) upon which the rational and integral organization of ancient Eastern societies was based.

—Evola on the J*ws:

1/ In a Talmudic text, we read: “Wherever the J*ws 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, 2/ they ought never to stop crying: What torment! 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

—Evola on the so-called “West:”

1/ This civilization has brought about the most complete perversion of the rational order of things. It is a realm of materialism, gold, machinery, and numbers, where there is no longer any breathing space, freedom, or light. 2/ The West has lost the sense of command and obedience. It has lost the sense of contemplation and action. It has lost the sense of hierarchy, of spiritual power, of god-like men. It no longer understands nature. For Westerners, nature is no longer a living body made up

—Evola on the difference between Nationality and (plebæian) Nationalism:

1/ It is necessary to distinguish between nationality and nationalism. The Middle Ages knew nationalities but not nationalisms. Nationality is a natural factor that encompasses a certain group of common 2/ elementary characteristics that are retained both in the hierarchical differentiation and in the hierarchical participation, which they do not oppose. Therefore, during the Middle Ages, castes, social bodies, and orders were articulated within various nationalities,

—Evola on Feminism:

1/ So far as the genders go, feminism, in its demand for equality, subscribes to the view according to which every difference & every distance is to be held an evil. It would abolish the specificity of functions and types, it would tend to something uniform, 2/ which however we will not say lies (as is believed) ‘beyond’, but rather ‘within’, individuation and the differentiation of the sexes. The result is precisely either the altogether new neutral and Amazonic type of American women and of the sportive European ‘garçonnes’—or else

—A long and important, but incomplete, thread: Evola on Nietzsche:

1/ Nietzsche presents himself as a typically modern figure; that is, he presents himself as a strongly defined personality but one completely deprived of the sense that the personality itself is only the 2/ contingent expression of a superior principle. Thus, a kind of closed circuit was created in him, in which power accumulates, differentiates itself, exasperates itself, and desperately seeks liberation. Nietzsche had virtually no understanding of the great spiritual traditions

1. “I turned my back on the rulers when I saw what they called ruling: bartering and haggling with the rabble. . . . Among all the hypocrisies, this seems to me the worst: that even those who commanded feigned the virtues of the serfs”—Nietzsche’s words are without exception still true of the so-called ruling class of our times. 2. Like the true state, the hierarchical, organic state has ceased to exist. No comparable party or movement exists, offering itself as a defender of higher ideas, to which one can unconditionally adhere and support with absolute fidelity.

1. Losing oneself takes on a special importance in an epoch of dissolution. It is the way to master every transformation that may occur, even the most perilous ones. A passage in the Upanishads marks its extreme limit, speaking of him against whom death is powerless, 2. because it has become part of his being. In this state, outside events that might affect or upset his being can become the stimulus that activates an ever greater freedom and potential. The transcendent dimension, which holds firm through all turns of the tide,

—Evola on contemporary artistic ‘criticism’:

1. Contemporary ‘criticism’ is condemned to pure subjectivism, which is to say arbitrariness. Often today it is critics themselves who manipulate values according to ‘intelligent stupidity’, inventing them where they do not exist, 2. or concealing them where they do—calling the shots one way or another. As for the public, what we find here once again, if only in another form, is the passiveness and impressionability typical of our contemporaries (who, according to the democratic fad, have become ‘adults’)

—Evola on “intelligent stupidity”:

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,” 2. attaching great importance to slick and professional “good writing,” 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.

—Evola’s comment on the fact that many young people were buying and reading any of his books without distinction:

1. «What I think is that this kind of behaviour can potentially lead to dangerous misunderstandings. Young people chiefly interested in my work for political reasons 2. should stick to Revolt Against the Modern World, as it provides both general overview of the world of Tradition and the modern world, and gives the reader an idea of a ‘metaphysics of history’ in contrast to mainstream historiography. One might also want to turn to The Mystery

Evola on ‘real’ action and its degeneration in the West:

1/ They awaken, command, and direct movement: they make others act but do not act themselves; that is, they are not carried away by action but are the action itself, a calm and impassive superiority from which action 2/ proceeds and depends. This is why their command, powerful and invisible, can be described, with Lao-tzu, as “action without action” (wei-wu-wei). Conversely, those who act are already acted upon; those who are taken by action, who are intoxicated with action, “will,” & “force”

1/ “There is nothing to which the young are more inclined than leaping from the weighty to the frivolous, especially when it’s pleasant & possessed of a beautiful surface. The young are then prone to setting aside the ancient authors, who are the true exemplars of the beautiful, 2/ to neglect philosophy, theology, and a thorough grounding in other departments of knowledge, so that they may take recreation in the witty writings of their own language and therewith fill their imaginations. That is how matters stand in schools and academies, and since it is

1/ “Sex is the “greatest magical force in nature”; an impulse acts in it which suggests the mystery of the One, even when almost everything in the relationship between man and woman deteriorates into animal embraces and is exhausted and dispersed in a faded idealizing 2/ sentimentality or in the habitual routine of socially acceptable conjugal relations. The metaphysics of sex survives in the very cases where, in looking at wretched mankind and the vulgarity of infinite lovers of infinite races—endless masks and individuations of the Absolute

1/ The union between a man and a woman can (and should) be the most celestial thing in one’e life, the highest, the noblest, the most fulfiling and expressive of one’s Being, the very thing that makes you believe in the transcendent, in the other-worldly, nay, in God himself.— 2/ And yet you look around you and you see youths lowering this union down to something so demeaning, ephemeral, exploitive, pitiable, unserious, unsecure, and trivial to an extent that cannot but grieve the heart that still has even a droplet of what one might call “humanness.”

1/ Rites, institutions, laws, and customs may still continue to exist for a certain time; but with their meaning lost and their “virtue” paralysed they are nothing but empty shells. Once they are abandoned to themselves and have become secularised, they crumble like parched olay 2/ and become increasingly disfigured and altered, despite all attempts to retain from the outside, whether through violence or imposition, the lost inner unity. As long as a shadow of the action of the superior element remains, however, and an echo of it exists in the blood,

1/ In the world of the ‘‘evolved’’ ‘‘emancipated,’’ and self-aware woman, there may exist [between man and woman] the promiscuity of an ambiguous camaraderie or pallid intellectual affinities. There may be encounters of pleasure, akin to arranging a bridge game—but love, 2/ in its truest & most elemental sense [= a kind of sheer polarity, & not faceless equality, between absolutes], shall be no more; that love, in which the ancients perceived the manifestation of a primordial & formidable force, imbued with cosmic significance, has vanished.

1. «Technocracy will Americanise us, progress will starve our spirituality so far that nothing of the bloodthirsty, frivolous or unnatural dreams of the utopist will be comparable to those positive facts. I invite any thinking person to show me what is left of life. 2. Religion! It is useless to talk about it, or to look for its remnants; it is a scandal that one takes the trouble even of denying God. Private property! It was—strictly speaking—abolished with the suppression of the right of primogeniture;

1. The truth is rather that at the bottom of feminism there hides a ‘radical pessimism’: that is, the tacit premise that woman ‘as woman’ cannot find value in herself, for which she must, insofar as she can, make herself into a man, claim the same social and intellectual 2. prerogatives of man. In this sense, we call it pessimism: the presumed feminist ‘vindication’ of woman conceals an abdication of modern woman, her impotence, or her mistrust, at being and at having value as that which she is: as woman, and not as man.