Julius Evola Quotes

“America has created a 'civilization' that represents an exact contradiction of the ancient European tradition. It has introduced the religion of praxis and productivity; it has put the quest for profit, great industrial production, and mechanical, visible, and quantitative achievements over any other interest.

It has generated a soulless greatness of a purely technological and collective nature, lacking any background of transcendence, inner light, and true spirituality. America has built a society where man becomes a mere instrument of production and material productivity within a conformist social conglomerate.”

“American women are characteristically frigid and materialistic. The man who 'has his way' with an American girl is under a material obligation to her.

The woman has granted a material favour. In cases of divorce American law overwhelmingly favours the woman. American women will divorce readily enough when they see a better bargain.

It is frequently the case in America that a woman will be married to one man but already 'engaged' to a future husband, the man she plans to marry after a profitable divorce.”

“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.”

“Be what progressives call an extremist.”

“But, the true reason for the success of such new expositions [translated Eastern religious texts] is to be found where they are the most accommodating, least rigid, least severe, most vague, and ready to come to easy terms with the prejudices and weaknesses of the modern world. Let everyone have the courage to look deeply into himself and to see what it is that he really wants.”

“Even without being killed a man can experience death, he can conquer, he can realize the culmination characteristic of a 'super-life'.

From a higher point of view, Paradise, the Kingdom of Heaven, Valhalla, the Island of the Heroes, etc., are only symbolic figurations forged for the masses, figurations that in reality designate transcendent states of consciousness, beyond life and death.

The ancient Aryan tradition used the term jivan-mukti to indicate such a realization while still in the mortal body.”

“If a 'superman' undoubtedly constitutes a central idea of the whole of Nietzschean thought, it is in terms of a 'positive superman', it is not that grotesqueness in the style of d’Annunzio, nor the 'blond beast of prey' (this is one of Nietzsche’s poorest expressions) and not even the exceptional individual who incarnates a maximum of the 'will to power', 'beyond good and evil', however without any light and without a higher sanction.

The positive superman, which suits the 'better Nietzsche', is instead to be identified with the human type who even in a nihilistic, devastated, absurd, godless world knows how to stand on his feet, because he is capable of giving himself a law from himself, in accordance with a new higher freedom.”

“It will no longer be the idea that gives value and power to an individual, but the individual that gives value, power and justification to an idea.”

“My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.”

“The 'human' sense of life, so typical of the modern West, confirms its plebeian and lower aspect. That which some were ashamed of – 'man' – others took pride in.

The ancient world elevated the individual to God, made every effort to unbind him from passion, to adapt him to transcendence, with free air of heights in contemplation as well as in action; it knew traditions of non-human heroes and of men of divine blood.

The Semiticised world not only deprived the 'creature' of the divine, but finally reduced God to a human figure. Bringing back to life the demonism of a Pelasgian substratum, it substituted the pure Olympian regions, vertiginous in their radiant perfection, with the terrorist viewpoints of its apocalypses, of hells, of predestination, of perdition.

God was no longer the aristocratic god of the Romans, the god pf patricians, to whom one prays standing, in the light of the fire, head up high and which is carried at the head of the victorious legions.”

“The Americans are the living refutation of the Cartesian axiom, 'I think, therefore I am': Americans do not think, yet they are.”

“The emancipation of women was destined to follow that of the slaves and the glorification of people without a caste and without traditions, namely, the pariah.

In a society that no longer understands the figure of the ascetic and of the warrior; in which the hands of the latest aristocrats seem better fit to hold tennis rackets or shakers for cocktail mixes than swords or scepters; in which the archetype of the virile man is represented by a boxer or by a movie star if not by the dull wimp represented by the intellectual, the college professor, the narcissistic puppet of the artist, or the busy and dirty money-making banker and the politician – in such a society it was only a matter of time before women rose up and claimed for themselves a 'personality' and a 'freedom' according to the anarchist and individualist meaning usually associated with these words.”

“The legionary spirit is that fire of one who will choose the hardest road, who will fight to the death even when all is already lost.”

“The true state will be oriented against both capitalism and communism. At its center will stand a principle of authority and a transcendent symbol of sovereignty. The state is the primary element that precedes nation, people, and society.

The state – and with the state everything that is properly constituted as political order and political reality – is defined essentially on the basis of an idea, not by naturalistic and contractual factors.”

“This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur.”

“Wisdom is an absolute positivism which regards only what can be grasped by direct experience as real, and everything else as unreal, abstract, and illusory.”

“Worldview is not based on books; it is an internal form, which at times in a person with little education is expressed much more brightly, than in some other 'intellectual' or scientist.”

“Let us repeat this: inner action must precede all other action.”

“L. T. Woodward has also rightly brought to light a form of psychological sadism in those women of today who 'make a great show of their bodies but apply a symbolic placard bearing the words 'Do not touch'.

Sexual tormentresses of this kind are found everywhere: in the girl who wears a minute bikini, the married woman with a provocatively low neckline, the young woman who walks along the street wiggling her hips in very tight pants or in a miniskirt that leaves more than half of her thighs exposed and who wants to be looked at but not touched — all of these types are capable of showing anger.”

“We cannot ask ourselves whether ‘woman’ is superior or inferior to ‘man’ any more than we can ask ourselves whether water is superior or inferior to fire.

There can be no doubt that a woman who is perfectly woman is superior to a man who is imperfectly man, just as a farmer who is faithful to his land and performs his work perfectly is superior to a king who cannot do his own work.”

“Weininger observed that nothing is more baffling for a man than a woman’s response when caught in a lie. When asked why she is lying, she is unable to understand the question, acts astonished, bursts out crying, or seeks to pacify him by smiling.

She cannot understand the ethical and transcendental side of lying or the fact that a lie represents damage to being and, as was acknowledged in ancient Iran, constitutes a crime even worse than killing. It is nonsense to deduce this trait in women from sociological factors; some people say that a lie is the 'natural weapon' of the woman and therefore used in her defense for hundreds of years.

The truth, pure and simple, is that woman is prone to lie and to disguise her true self even when she has no need to do so; this is not a social trait acquired in the struggle for existence, but something linked to her deepest and most genuine nature.

Just as the absolute woman does not truly feel that lying is wrong, so in her, contrary to man, lying is not wrong, nor is it an inner yielding or a breaking of her own existential law. It is a possible counterpart of her plastic and fluid nature.

A type such as D’Aurevilly described is perfectly understandable: “She made a habit of lying to the point where it became truth; it was so simple and natural, without any effort or alleviation."

It is foolish to judge woman with the values of the absolute man even in cases where, by doing violence to her own self, she makes a show of following those values and even sincerely believes that she is following them.”

“The true state – it is hardly necessary to say this – does not admit the rule of parties (partitocrazia) of democratic regimes.”

“Contrary to what the bourgeois and liberal polemics claim, the warrior idea may not be reduced to materialism, nor is it synonymous with the exaltation of the brutal use of strength and destructive violence.

Rather, the calm, conscious, and planned development of the inner being and a code of ethics; love of distance; hierarchy; order; the faculty of subordinating the emotional and individualistic element of one’s self to higher goals and principles, especially in the name of honor and duty – these are the elements of the warrior idea, and they act as the foundations of a specific “style” that has largely been lost.”

“For the authentic revolutionary conservative, what really counts is to be faithful not to past forms and institutions, but rather to principles of which such forms and institutions have been particular expressions, adequate for a specific period of time and in a specific geographical area.”

“Nothing is more evident than that modern capitalism is just as subversive as Marxism. The materialistic view of life on which both systems are based is identical; both of their ideals are qualitatively identical, including the premises connected to a world the centre of which is constituted of technology, science, production, 'productivity', and 'consumption'.

And as long as we only talk about economic classes, profit, salaries, and production, and as long as we believe that real human progress is determined by a particular system of distribution of wealth and goods, and that, generally speaking, human progress is measured by the degree of wealth or indigence—then we are not even close to what is essential.”

“The essential task ahead requires formulating an adequate doctrine, upholding principles that have been thoroughly studied, and, beginning from these, giving birth to an Order.

This elite, differentiating itself on a plane that is defined in terms of spiritual virility, decisiveness, and impersonality, and where every naturalistic bond loses its power and value, will be the bearer of a new principle of a higher authority and sovereignty; it will be able to denounce subversion and demagogy in whatever form they appear and reverse the downward spiral of the top-level cadres and the irresistible rise to power of the masses.

From this elite, as if from a seed, a political organism and an integrated nation will emerge, enjoying the same dignity as the nations created by the great European political tradition. Anything short of this amounts only to a quagmire, dilettantism, irrealism, and obliquity.”

“The substance of every true and stable political organism is something resembling an Order, a Männerbünd in charge of the principle of the imperium, comprising men who see loyalty as the basis of their honor.”

“There is a superior unity of all those who despite all, fight in different parts of the world the same battle, lead the same revolt, and are the bearers of the same intangible Tradition.

These forces appear to be scattered and isolated in the world, and yet are inexorably connected by a common essence that is meant to preserve the absolute ideal of the Imperium and to work for its return.”

“In the Islamic tradition a distinction is made between two holy wars, the "greater holy war" (el-jihadul-akbar) and the "lesser holy war" (el-jihadul-ashgar). This distinction originated from a saying (hadith) of the Prophet, who on the way back from a military expedition said: "You have returned from a lesser holy war to a great holy war."

The greater holy war is of an inner and spiritual nature; the other is the material war waged externally against an enemy population with the particular intent of bringing "infidel" populations under the rule of "God's Law" (al-Islam).

The relationship between the "greater" and "lesser holy war", however, mirrors the relationship between the soul and the body; in order to understand the heroic asceticism or "path of action", it is necessary to understand the situation in which the two paths merge, the "lesser holy war" becoming the means through which a "greater holy war" is carried out, and vice versa: the "little holy war", or the external one, becomes almost a ritual action that expresses and gives witness to the reality of the first. Originally, orthodox Islam conceived of a unitary form of asceticism: that which is connected to the jihad or "holy war".”

“The fundamental principle underlying all justifications of war, from the point of view of human personality, is ‘heroism’.

War, it is said, offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero who sleeps within him. War breaks the routine of comfortable life; by means of its severe ordeals, it offers a transfiguring knowledge of life, life according to death.

The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero, even if it is the final moment of his earthly life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of values than a protracted existence spent consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities.

From a spiritual point of view, these possibilities make up for the negative and destructive tendencies of war, which are one-sidedly and tendentiously highlighted by pacifist materialism.

War makes one realize the relativity of human life and therefore also the law of a ‘more-than-life’, and thus war has always an anti-materialist value, a spiritual value.”