Jack Donovan Quotes Page 2

“If you are never truly challenged in a meaningful way and are only required to perform idiot-proofed corporate processes to get your meat and shelter, can you ever truly be engaged enough to call yourself alive, let alone a man?”

“Men aren’t wired to fight or cooperate; they are wired to fight and cooperate.”

“Men cannot be men — much less good or heroic men — unless their actions have meaningful consequences to people they truly care about. Strength requires an opposing force, courage requires risk, mastery requires hard work, honor requires accountability to other men.

Without these things, we are little more than boys playing at being men, and there is no weekend retreat or mantra or half-assed rite of passage that can change that. A rite of passage must reflect a real change in status and responsibility for it to be anything more than theater.

No reimagined manhood of convenience can hold its head high so long as the earth remains the tomb of our ancestors.”

“Men of ideas and men of action have much to learn from each other, and the truly great are men of both action and abstraction.”

“Men who don’t care about what the other men think of them aren’t dependable or trustworthy.”

“No man who has become masterful at anything has achieved that mastery without a certain amount of failure along the way.”

“One of the great tragedies of modernity is the lack of opportunity for men to become what they are, to do what they were bred to do, what their bodies want to do.

They could be Plato’s noble puppies, but they are chained to a stake in the ground — left to the madness of barking at shadows in the night, taunted by passing challenges left unresolved and whose outcomes will forever be unknown.”

“One of the problems with massive welfare states is that they make children or beggars of us all, and as such are an affront and a barrier to adult masculinity.

It has become clichéd comedy for men and women to laugh at men who are concerned with being competent. The 'men refuse to stop and ask for directions' joke never seems to get old for women, who are more comfortable with dependence, or socialist types, because reducing men to a childlike state of supplication and submission to state bureaucrats is required for big-government welfare states to function.

Masculine loathing of dependence is a bulwark to the therapeutic mother state.”

“People can talk tough without having to do the primitive math of violence, because they believe that law enforcement will either intervene and stop or punish an attacker.”

“Plato (or Socrates) also compared men to dogs. One of the great tragedies of modernity is the lack of opportunity for men to become what they are, to do what they were bred to do, what their bodies want to do.”

“Politicians see a more politically and socially active population that must be appeased, and they will continue to fall all over themselves to get the female vote. Women are better suited to and better served by the globalism and consumerism of modern democracies that promise security, no-strings attached sex and shopping.

The new Way of Women depends on prosperity, security, and globalism. Any return of honor and The Way of Men and the eventual restoration of balance and harmony between the sexes will require the weakening of all three.”

“Sometimes men pick fights just for something to do – just to feel something like the threat of harm and the possibility of triumph.”

“Strength is the ability to exert one’s will over oneself, over nature and over other people.”

“Strength isn’t the only quality that matters. Sometimes it doesn’t matter at all. Strength is rarely a disadvantage.”

“Strength, Courage, Mastery, and Honor are the alpha virtues of men all over the world. They are the fundamental virtues of men because without them, no 'higher' virtues can be entertained. You need to be alive to philosophize.

You can add to these virtues and you can create rules and moral codes to govern them, but if you remove them from the equation altogether you aren’t just leaving behind the virtues that are specific to men, you are abandoning the virtues that make civilization possible.”

“Strength, Courage, Mastery, and Honor are what they must demand of each other if they are going to win.”

“The cost of civilization is a progressive trade-off of vital existence. It’s a trade of the real for the artificial, for the convincing con, made for the promise of security and a full belly.”

“The experience of being male is the experience of having greater strength, and strength must be exercised and demonstrated to be of any worth. When men will not or cannot exercise their strength or put it to use, strength is decorative and worthless.”

“The Internet is a good filter. It’s a good way to find men who share some of your values. However, your friends on message boards and on social networking sites, scattered all over the world, are not going to be there for you when the proverbial sh*t hits the fan.

Spend more time making contact with men who are geographically close to you. If you have close friends in your area, consider moving into the same apartment complex or within a few blocks of one another. Think about the way gangs start in inner cities. Men and boys have lived and died to defend tribes with territories as small as a few blocks.

Proximity creates familiarity and shared identity. It creates us. Spreading our alliances across nations and continents keeps us reliant on the power of the State and the global economy. Men who are separated and have no one else to rely on must rely on the State.”

“There is no point in an adult male’s life when he can be excused from carrying his own weight, except when he is sick, injured, handicapped or old.

Human societies accommodate all of these exceptions, but competency has always been crucial to a man’s mental health and sense of his own worth. Men want to carry their own weight, and they should be expected to.

As Don Corleone might put it, women and children could afford to be careless for most of human history, but not men. Men have always had to demonstrate to the group that they could carry their own weight.”

“To be honored, as Hobbes recognized, is to be esteemed, and as humans are differently abled and differently motivated, some will earn greater esteem than others.”

“To protect and serve their own interests, the wealthy and privileged have used feminists and pacifists to promote a masculinity that has nothing to do with being good at being a man, and everything to do with being what they consider a 'good man'.

Their version of a good man is isolated from his peers, emotional, effectively impotent, easy to manage, and tactically inept. A man who is more concerned with being a good man than being good at being a man makes a very well-behaved slave.”

“Until you can function as a competent member of the group and carry your own weight, you are a supplicant and a drag on the collective.”

“We were born into a peace of plenty, a pleasure-economy, a bonobo mast*rbation society. The future that our elite handlers have in store for us advertises more of the same. More detached pleasure, less risk, freedom from want, more mast*rbation.”

“What the modern world offers average men is a thousand and one ways to safely spank our monkey brains into oblivion.”

“What’s the point in trying if you know the game is rigged? For the satisfaction of knowing you are contributing to the greater good? That’s just the kind of stupid thing an intellectual would say.”

“When men evaluate each other as men, they still look for the same virtues that they’d need to keep the perimeter. Men respond to and admire the qualities that would make men useful and dependable in an emergency.

Men have always had a role apart, and they still judge one another according to the demands of that role as a guardian in a gang struggling for survival against encroaching doom. Everything that is specifically about being a man — not merely a person — has to do with that role.”

“When someone tells a man to be a man, they mean that there is a way to be a man. A man is not just a thing to be — it is also a way to be, a path to follow and a way to walk.

Some try to make manhood mean everything. Others believe that it means nothing at all. Being good at being a man can’t mean everything, and it has always meant something.”

“Without strength, masculinity becomes something else — a different concept.”

“You’ll want men who are competent, who can get the job done. Who wants to be surrounded by morons and f*ck-ups?”