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.

1. So far as the genders go, feminism, in its demand for equality, subscribes to the view according to which every difference and every distance is to be held an evil. It would abolish the specificity of functions and types, it would tend to something uniform, which however we 2. 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 the presexual,

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. As in a mirror, he “looks at himself again and again before performing an action; he looks at himself again and again before saying a word; he looks at himself again and again before harbouring a thought.” It can easily be seen that by following such a path a 2. man naturally transforms himself into a kind of living statue made up of awareness, into a figure pervaded by composedness, decorum, and dignity, a figure that inevitably calls to mind not only the whole style of the ancient Aryan aristocracy but also that made famous by the

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/ It was not Fascism that negatively affected the Italian people, the ‘Italian race’, but vice versa. It was this people, this ‘race’ that negatively affected Fascism, that is, the Fascist experiment, insofar as Italy could not furnish a sufficient number of men who could rise 2/ to the challenge of certain high demands and symbols, men who were healthy elements and able to promote the development of the positive potential that could have been contained in the Fascist system. This deficiency must also be taken into consideration in regard to really

1/ As today marks the 300th anniversary of the birthday of Kant, maybe it is of interest to know that, Evola, during the days of the university, came to learn German in his early twenties, and then started devouring Kant (there are whole pages in his journals dedicated to Kant’s 2/ three ‘Kritiken’), Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and the majority of modern and contemporary philosophical texts back then. It is certainly due to this that, Guénon described Evola as saturated with German Idealism more than enough. Of more interest is to know that,

On the foundation of Rome, by Massimo Scaligero (a lengthy but important thread):

1/ «Beyond the veil of myth, the foundation of the City of Rome presents in its drama the signs of a new history of the West, through a chain of events that are to be considered symbols of a new

2/ way of seeing & organizing life & that, therefore, in the old & decadent Mediterranean world, herald the Roman conquest of the West. It should be said that the rite of the foundation is the prelude, in its naked drama, to the eternal virtues of the Empire: the founder is

1/ For a global evaluation of German racism, the German-Aryan presumption under which, as Hitler proclaimed, being a street sweeper in the Reich should be considered a greater honor than being the king of a foreign country, should seem a demagogic aberration. 2/ Nonetheless, the fact remains that, even from the point of view of the Right, a certain balanced consciousness and dignity of 'race' can be considered as salutary, if we think where we have ended up in our days with the exaltation of the Negro and all the rest,