Revolt Against the Modern World Quotes

“The blood of the heroes is closer to God than the ink of the philosophers and the prayers of the faithful.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“Being and stability are regarded by our contemporaries as akin to death; they cannot live unless they act, fret, or distract themselves with this or that. Their spirit (provided we can still talk about a spirit in their case) feeds only on sensations and on dynamism, thus becoming the vehicle for the incarnation of darker forces.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“It is necessary to have “watchers” at hand who will bear witness to the values of Tradition in ever more uncompromising and firm ways, as the anti-traditional forces grow in strength. Even though these values cannot be achieved, it does not mean that they amount to mere “ideas.” These are MEASURES…. Let people of our time talk about these things with condescension as if they were anachronistic and anti-historical; we know that this is an alibi for their defeat. Let us leave modern men to their “truths” and let us only be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“Nothing is further from the truth than the claim that the American soul is 'open-minded' and unbiased; on the contrary, it is ridden with countless taboos of which people are sometimes not even aware.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“No idea is as absurd as the idea of progress.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“The best and most authentic reaction against feminism and against every other female aberration should not be aimed at women as such, but at men instead. It should not be expected of women that they return to what they really are and thus reestablish the necessary inner and outer conditions for a reintegration of a superior race, when men themselves retain only the semblance of true virility.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“Nothing is further from the truth than the claim that the American soul is ‘open-minded’ and unbiased; on the contrary, it is ridden with countless taboos of which people are sometimes not even aware.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“One thing becomes very clear; if the Empire declines and if it continues to exist only nominally, its antagonist, the Church, after enjoying untrammeled freedom from its ancient foe, did not know how to assume its legacy, and demonstrated its inability to organize the Western world according to the Guelph ideal. What replaced the Empire was not the Church at the head of a reinvigorated "Christendom," but the multiplicity of national states that were increasingly intolerant of any higher principle of authority.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“According to traditional man the physical plane merely contains effects; nothing takes place in this world that did not originate first in the next world or in the invisible dimension.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“There are species that retain their characteristics even in conditions that are relatively different from their natural ones; other species in similar circumstances instead become extinct; otherwise what takes place is racial mixing with other elements in which no assimilation or real evolution occurs. The result of this interbreeding closely resembles Mendel’s laws concerning heredity: once it disappears in the phenotype, the primitive element survives in the form of a separated, latent heredity that is capable of cropping up in sporadic apparitions, even though it is always endowed with a character of heterogeneity in regard to the superior type.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“At the origin of every true civilization there lies a "divine" event (every great civilization has its own myth concerning divine founders): thus, no human or naturalistic factor can fully account for it. The adulteration and decline of civilizations is caused by an event of the same order, though it acts in the opposite, degenerative sense.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“According to the modern man, both causes and effects are relegated to the physical plane, framed within time and space. According to the traditional man the physical plane merely contains effects; nothing takes place in this world that did not originate first in the next world or in the invisible dimension.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“Kingship was the supreme form of government, and was believed to be in the natural order of things. It did not need physical strength to assert itself, and when it did, it was only sporadically. It imposed itself mainly and irresistibly through the spirit.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“حالما يتم اﻹقرار بالصفة المقدسة لقانون ما وكانت أصوله راجعة لتقليد غير بشري، حينها سلطته تصبح مطلقة؛ هذا القانون يصبح أقدس من أن يذكر، جامد، ثابت و وراء كل انتقاد. هكذا كل انتهاك لهذا القانون لا يعتبر كجريمة ضد المجتمع، بل أكثر من ذلك كتدنيس للمقدسات أو كفعل يعبر عن عدم التقوى، أو كفعل يعرض القدر الروحي للشخص الذي عصى للخطر فضلا عن الناس الذين كان هذا الشخص على علاقة بهم.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“Let people of our time talk about these things with condescension as if they were anachronistic and antihistorical; we know that this is an alibi for their defeat. Let us leave modern men to their "truths" and let us only be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“Beside the great "currents" of the world there are still individuals who are rooted in terra firma. Generally speaking, they are unknown people who shun the spotlight of modern popularity and culture. They live on spiritual heights; they do not belong to this world. Though they are scattered over the earth and often ignorant of each other's existence, they are united by an invisible bond and form an unbreakable chain in the traditional spirit... by virtue of these people, Tradition is present despite all; the flame burns invisibly and something still connects the world to the superworld. They are those who are awake[.]”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“In order to understand the spiritual background typical of every non-modem civilization, it is necessary to retain the idea that the opposition between historical times and 'prehistoric' or 'mythological' times is not the relative opposition proper to two homogeneous parts of the same time frame, but rather the qualitative and substantial opposition between times (or experiences of time) that are not of the same kind. Traditional man did not have the same experience of time as modem man; he had a supertemporal sense of time and in this sensation lived every form of his world, Thus, the modem researchers of 'history' at a given point encounter an interruption of the series and an incomprehensible gap, beyond which they cannot construct any 'certain' and meaningful historical theory; they can only rely upon fragmentary, external, and often contradictory elements — unless they radically change their method and mentality.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

““Be radical, have principles, be absolute, be that which the bourgeoisie calls an extremist: give yourself without counting or calculating, don't accept what they call ‘the reality of life' and act in such a way that you won't be accepted by that kind of ‘life', never abandon the principle of struggle.””
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“Within a nominally Christian world, chivalry upheld without any substantial alterations an Aryan ethics in the following things:
(1) upholding the ideal of the hero rather than the saint, and of the conqueror rather than of the martyr;
(2) regarding faithfulness and honor, rather than caritas and humbleness, as the highest virtues;
(3) regarding cowardice and dishonor, rather than sin, as the worst possible evil;
(4) ignoring or hardly putting into practice the evangelical precepts of not opposing evil and not retaliating against offenses, but rather, methodically punishing unfairness and evil;
(5) excluding from its ranks those who followed the Christian precept ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ to the letter; and
(6) refusing to love one’s enemy and instead fighting him and being magnanimous only after defeating him.

...

In reality, chivalry was animated by the impulse toward a ‘traditional’ restoration in the highest sense of the word, with the silent or explicit overcoming of the Christian religious spirit.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“To fight on "the path of God" has been characterized as "medieval" fanaticism; conversely, it has been characterized as a most sacred cause to fight for "patriotic" and "nationalistic" ideals and for other myths that in our contemporary era have eventually been unmasked and shown to be the instruments of irrational, materialistic, and destructive forces... Soldiers went to the front to experience war as something else, namely, as a crisis that all too often did not turn out to be an authentic and heroic transfiguration of the personality, but rather the regression of the individual to a plane of savage instincts, "reflexes," and reactions that retain very little of the human”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“[T]hose who love to contrast the past with our recent times should consider what modern civilization has brought us to in terms of war. A change of level has occurred; from the warrior who fights for the honor and for the right of his lord, society has shifted to the type of the mere "soldier" that is found in association with the removal of all transcendent or even religious elements in the idea of fighting.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“The "enemy" who resists us and the "infidel" within ourselves must be subdued and put in chains. This enemy is the animalistic yearning and instinct, the disorganized multiplicity of impulses, the limitations imposed on us by a fictitious self, and thus also fear, weakness, and uncertainty; this subduing of the enemy is the only way to achieve inner liberation or the rebirth in a state of a deeper inner unity and "peace" in the esoteric and triumphal sense of the word.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“The people guilty of crossing the "caste line" were considered the only "impure" beings in the entire hierarchy... In India only the people "without a caste" were considered outcasts, and they were shunned even by the lowest caste, even if they had previously belonged to the highest caste; on the contrary, nobody felt humiliated by his own caste and even a sudra was as proud of and as committed to his own caste as a brahmana of the highest station was to his.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“Knighthood, instead, appeared as a superterritorial and supernational community in which its members, who were consecrated to military priesthood, no longer had a homeland and thus were bound by faithfulness not to people but, on the one hand, to an ethics that had as its fundamental values honor, truth, courage, and loyalty and, on the other hand, to a spiritual authority of a universal type, which was essentially that of the Empire.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“Thus, as far as the destiny of the soul after death is concerned, there are two opposite paths. The first is the "path of the gods," also known as the "solar path" or Zeus's path, which leads to the bright dwellings of the immortals. This dwelling was variously represented as a height, heaven, or an island, from the Nordic Valhalla and Asgard to the Aztec-Inca "House of the Sun" that was reserved for kings, heroes, and nobles. The other path is that trodden by those who do not survive in a real way, and who slowly yet inexorably dissolve back into their original stocks, into the "totems" that unlike single individuals, never die; this is the life of Hades, of the "infernals," of Niflheim, of the chthonic deities.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“The dignity a god enjoys on earth is splendid, but hard to achieve for the weak. Only he who sets his soul on this objective, is worthy to become a king.' The ruler appears as a "follower of the discipline that is practiced by those who are gods among men.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“A political, economic, and social order created merely for the sake of temporal life is exclusively characteristic of the modern world, that is, of the antitraditional world.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“One thing becomes very clear; of the Empire declines and if it continues to exist only nominally, its antagonist, the Church, after enjoying untrammeled freedom from its ancient foe, did not know how to assume its legacy, and demonstrated its inability to organize the Western world according to the Guelph ideal. What replaced the Empire was not the Church at the head of a reinvigorated "Christendom," but the multiplicity of national states that were increasingly intolerant of any higher principle of authority.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“Ao cabo de séculos de «escravidão» a mulher quis pois ser livre, ser ela própria. Mas o «femininismo» não soube conceber para a mulher uma personalidade que não fosse uma imitação da masculina, de maneira que as suas «reivindicações» ocultam uma desconfiança fundamental da mulher nova em relação a si mesma, a impotência desta para ser o que é e a contar pelo que ela é: como mulher e não como homem. Devido a esta fatal incompreensão, a mulher moderna experimentou o sentimento de uma inferioridade absolutamente imaginária por ser apenas mulher e sente quase como ofensa o ser tratada «só como mulher». Foi esta a origem de uma falsa vocação frustrada: e é precisamente por isso que a mulher quis tirar uma desforra, reivindicar a sua «dignidade», mostrar o seu «valor» - passando a medir--se com o homem. Todavia, não se tratava de maneira nenhuma do homem verdadeiro, mas sim do homem-construção, do homem-fantoche de uma civilização standardizada, racionalizada, não implicando quase mais nada de diferenciado e qualitativo. Numa civilização como esta, evidentemente, já não se pode tratar de um privilégio legítimo qualquer, e as mulheres incapazes de reconhecer a sua vocação natural e de defendê-la, a não ser pelo plano mais baixo (pois nenhuma mulher sexualmente feliz sentiu alguma vez a necessidade de imitar e de invejar o homem), conseguiram facilmente demonstrar que também elas possuíam virtualmente as faculdades e as habilitações - materiais e intelectuais - que se encontram no outro sexo e que, em geral, se exigem e se apreciam numa sociedade de tipo moderno. O homem, de resto, deixou andar as coisas como um verdadeiro irresponsável, e até ajudou e impeliu a mulher para as ruas, para os escritórios, para as escolas, para as fábricas e para todas as encruzilhadas contaminantes da sociedade e da cultura modernas. Foi assim que se deu o último empurrão nivelador. (...) A mulher tradicional, a mulher absoluta, ao dar-se, ao não viver para si, ao querer ser toda para outro ser com simplicidade e pureza, realizava-se, pertencia-se a si mesma, tinha um heroísmo muito seu - e, no fundo, tornava-se superior ao homem comum. A mulher moderna ao querer ser por si mesma destruiu-se. A tão aspirada «personalidade» está a tirar-lhe toda a personalidade.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World

“This is what I think about the degeneration of the idea of regere once it has become secularized and separated from the traditional spiritual basis: it is merely a temporal and centralizing idea. When considering yet another aspect of this deviation, one will notice that it is typical of all priestly castes to refuse to acknowledge the imperial function and to aim at deconsecration of the concept of state and of royalty. Thus, without often realizing it, the priestly caste contributed to the formation of that lay and "realistic" mentality that unavoidably was destined to rise up against priestly authority itself and to ban any of its effective interferences against the state.”
― Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World