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Curtis Yarvin
210 quotes
“To debauch a people, debase their currency.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Rethinking subsidized finance" (March 9, 2009)
“To a true libertarian, "classical liberalism" is a moral imperative, not a prudent policy. To me, it is just a prudent policy, and it is only a prudent policy in those cases where it does not turn out to be imprudent.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Degrees of recourse", interfluidity (March 27, 2009).
“How do you anesthetize a population? When it reacts normally, convince it that it's being hysterical.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What does the decline in homicide rates look like?", Gene Expression (August 5, 2009).
“Today's American has no idea what it feels like to live in an atmosphere of genuine public safety and order.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: What does the decline in homicide rates look like?" (August 6, 2009).
“Reaction is the reconstruction or restoration of the civilized mind, through political power, from any form of progressive or revolutionary degradation. In order to be a great reactionary leader, you have to have made your subjects more sane through the exercise of force—probably through the drastic, but effective, method of curing them entirely of politics.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) first seen 2009 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Open thread…." (November 11, 2009).
“The way to do political, rather than cosmopolitical, economy is straightforward: consolidate the national balance sheet, treating the entire nation as a single corporation. Current account deficits then appear as losses. The notorious decay of nations which run a chronic trade deficit appears as a parallel with the notorious decay of corporations which run at a chronic loss. Similarly, the old mercantilist strategy of accumulating precious metals—much mocked by Adam Smith—appears as no more than the accumulation of retained earnings by a profitable polity.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Fixing “global imbalances” in three easy steps", interfluidity (February 11, 2010).
“People think at least as much about breeding each other as they do about breeding animals.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While there is no limited government, there is incomplete government; incomplete government means a vacuum made of anarchy; true anarchy is not even nothing, it is the billion tiny bubbles of local power we call crime; you don’t want to be anywhere near it; so, counting anarchy as governance, government power is absolute. A regime that tolerates crime has just chosen to share its absolute power with crime.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (May 31, 2022), "The Cathedral or the Bizarre: America’s experiments with democracy and oligarchy have both failed, leaving only one option", Tablet Magazine.
“The fundamental historical problem of the current period is why, though we can buy our ideas from any stall in a huge open-air bazaar, they all seem to come from the same manufacturer—exactly as if made in some cathedral. Yet there is no such conspiracy—and certainly no such agency. No person or institution is coordinating the party line.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (May 31, 2022), "The Cathedral or the Bizarre: America’s experiments with democracy and oligarchy have both failed, leaving only one option", Tablet Magazine.
“In a working monarchy, the monarch is the center of everything awesome. All awesome people rise toward the court, which is simply a fancy-dress ritual for the coolest, most important people in the country. “Office and custom, in all line of order".In our fallen democratic world, we refuse to process this frame. We insist that our kings and queens, if we still have them, be what we made them: ceremonial fops, crowned Kardashians, normal people in abnormal clothing. And when we take the magic of their power away—the prophecy fulfills itself.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) first seen 2022 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in "The return of the Earl", (Jul 28, 2022).
“As a people, we believe insane things, because democracy has driven us all insane. After all, it's had two hundred years to do so. Its edifice of magical thinking is a wonderful thing, ornate as a Disney castle, more worthy of admiration than destruction. Sadly, it is the castle of evil, and God's sweet fire will melt it in a flash.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was democratic power that executed Socrates; even lynching is a fundamentally democratic exercise of power. Lynching is mob violence; mob violence, unless the mob is an organized mob, is democratic violence. It is useless to pretend that mob violence was not an essential aspect of the American Revolution, for instance.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world before nationalism and democracy was a world of mild wars, small and effective governments, personal freedom, and civilized high culture… Note that, before the coming of nationalist democracy, it was actually not a problem at all for wealthy, high-IQ people to live in the same society as poor, low-IQ people. It worked just fine. The latter served the former.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we look at the astounding violence of the democratic era, it strikes me as quite defensible to simply write off the whole idea as a disaster, and focus on correcting the many faults of monarchism.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And while not all the crimes in this tragedy (crimes of the 20th century) were committed by democrats, democracy is indeed its prime and ultimate cause. It is not a coincidence that the century of murder and the century of democracy were one and the same.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A century and a half of democracy has wreaked unbelievable devastation on a place and people once considered by far the most promising on earth. No mere ecological pollution could possibly compare.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Politics can be defined as limited warfare. For example, you can see a democratic election as a form of civil war, in which both sides agree to settle the conflict by simply counting soldiers. While this is a long way from a war in which tank battles are legitimate but poison gas is not, the principle is the same, and no qualitative line can be drawn between the two.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is very difficult for a modern American to construct the history of the last 250 years as a history of decay. Decay is especially concealed by the obvious history of technical and scientific progress. While this has no reason at all to correlate with political or cultural progress, the two are certainly not hard to confuse.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thus, Anglo-American democracy causes the war (World War II), and its resulting terrors and destructions, because the nascent system of global suzerainty it set up in 1919 forces Germany to either accept a position which is permanently subordinate to the Anglo-American system or "international community," effectively sacrificing her independence as a nation, or demonstrate its disobedience by violently attacking that community. The dog has been backed into a corner; it must either cringe and submit, or bite. It probably should have cringed.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As in the late Roman period, declining official authority, declining personal morality, and increasing public bureaucracy are observed in synchrony. This is not in any way a coincidence. The combination is an infallible symptom of the great terminal disease of the polity — leftism. Leftism is cancer.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our modern democratic elections are an extremely poor substitute for actual regime change. As we've seen, democracy is to government as gray, slimy cancer is to pink and healthy living tissue. It is a degenerate neoplastic form. The only reason America has lasted as long as she has, and even still has more than a few years left, is that this malignancy is at present encysted in a thick husk of sclerotic scar tissue - our permanent civil service.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Was royalism a perfect system? It was not. But if we imagine a world in which the revolutions and civil wars of the last four centuries had never happened, it is hard not to imagine that world as happier, wealthier, freer, more civilized, and more pleasant.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no reason at all that a libertarian, such as myself, cannot favor martial law. I am free when my rights are defined and secured against all comers, regardless of official pretensions. Freedom implies law; law implies order; order implies peace; peace implies victory. As a libertarian, the greatest danger threat to my property is not Uncle Sam, but thieves and brigands. If Uncle Sam wakes up from his present sclerotic slumber and shows the brigands a strong hand, my liberty has been increased.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On a historical timescale, the practical effect of the sovereignty of the press is just to play yet another whack-a-mole game of quis custodiet ipsos custodes. Who watches the watchdog? In the end, this chain must logically terminate in a dog you just… trust. Sovereignty is conserved.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps the easiest way for a modern American or European to understand Nazism is to understand that a good Brown thought about preserving the Deutsche Volk in exactly the same way that today's Greens think about preserving the Environment.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One interesting case of an ideal shared by both the 1930s Nazis and the 2007 Progressives is the Environment. Nazi environmentalism was definitely a different thing from ours, but the family resemblance is clear, and although environmentalism was hardly the most important part of the Nazi program it perhaps provides a window into their worldview… Is it so impossible to imagine Environmentalism being used as the basis for mass murder?”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most progressives are socially normal human beings, who in any political environment, would just be choosing the largest, best-appointed bandwagon for their personal conveyance. In Nazi Germany they would be Nazis, in Russia they would be Bolsheviks, in the kingdom of Louis XIV they would be all for Louis XIV. This is one of the many reasons there is no need to guillotine them.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not at all surprising that progressives hate corporations and the profit system. It is a natural consequence of the antipathy to order, the anarchism, the lust for entropic destruction, which is the foundation of their creed.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our lovely "mainstream media" is not, of course, a hierarchical organization reporting to the hidden Elders of Journalism. However, modern journalism is descended from such a hierarchical organization. That organization was the Office of War Information, OWI.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(The United States’) industries are gutted and vanished. Her finances are ruined beyond imagining. Her old cities, but for a few, are dirty, dangerous, unlivable. Millions of feral, armed savages, perfectly de-civilized, run wild in her streets. Her famous social fabric is shredded, her famous voluntary institutions defunct, her population bored, lonely, atomized. Her small towns have rotted, turned into strip-malls, or both. (Her birds, however, are remarkably well-protected.)”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The American, being human, being descended from a long line of chimpanzees and their still more foul hominid spawn, craves status, importance, meaning, in a word: power. But power is hard, oh so hard, to come by in his whip-broken, fixed and empty life of pleasant boredom. The solution? Oh, solution there is none, for power does not grow on trees. Power is here in America, as everywhere; power in America is locked up tight as Katrina van den Heuvel's ass. It's open to someone, perhaps, but not to him.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“America has no surviving intellectual tradition besides progressivism — which is no more than a synonym for communism… Communism is as American as apple pie, and America today is a completely communist country.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I date the Fourth Republic and the Progressive period to 1933. We can read this story in two ways. We can read it as the coming of modern, scientific government in the United States. Or we can read it as the transfer of power from political democracy to the American university system — which, just for the sake of a catchy catchword, I like to call the Cathedral.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In fact, we know exactly what Washington's policies twenty years from now will be. They will certainly have nothing to do with "politics." They will be implementations of the ideas now taught at Harvard, Yale and Berkeley.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sponsoring murderous bands of thugs around the world has been, for the last half-century, State's (the U.S. State Department’s) job. It's a dangerous job. Everyone knows it. Obviously, they would like the thugs to be as un-murderous as possible. Especially toward their own people. And obviously, they do not see the picture through these glasses. They do not understand that the "men anywhere fighting" fight not because their grievances are unsatisfied, but because State itself has offered them the prospect of satisfaction through violence. State sincerely believes that the gasoline is water.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One way to elect a new people is to import them, of course. For example, to put it bluntly, the Democratic Party has captured California, once a Republican stronghold, by importing arbitrary numbers of Mexicans. Indeed the Third World is stocked with literally billions of potential Democrats, just waiting to come to America so that Washington can buy their votes.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'll tell you what the real emotion behind the Arab Spring was. Actually, Beavis can tell you better. "Fire is cool," said Beavis. Fire is indeed cool. Americans were bored and needed some better CNN. They wanted to see shit burn. Shit indeed burned, and is still burning. Which was cool. So they got what they wanted. Not too different from the crowd in the Colosseum, just less honest about how they satisfy their very simple chimp/human needs.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is impossible to count the New Deal's crimes. The list must include everything short of mass murder. And even that is arguable.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Until there's an election in which one box is a clear mandate for abolishing the New Deal, if not Washington itself, democratist conservatives are wasting time and annoying the pig.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A conservative is someone who helps disguise the true nature of a democratic state. The conservative is ineffective by definition, because his goal is to make democracy work properly. The fact that it does not work properly, has never worked properly, and will never work properly, sails straight over his head. He therefore labors cheerfully as a tool for his enemies.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Political power is a property right, however you slice it. It is owned, not deserved. It is not a natural or "human" right. And it has no more to do with freedom than brake fluid with fondue.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Here is yet another (idea for good government): restrict voting to homeowners. Note that this was widely practiced in Anglo-American history, and for very good reason.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While the civil-liberties geek of 2013 is a pathetic and even hilarious figure, it's not at all true that his passion has never gone requited. Actually, in its bureaucratic form, "civil liberties" helps keep the streets of San Francisco covered with turds and shambling zombies.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's a reality of modern American life that race confers privilege. As a reactionary, how can I possibly object? A society without hereditary privilege is like a cheeseburger without cheese.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For quite some time in America it's been illegal to employ racists, sexists and fascists, and mandatory to employ a precisely calibrated percentage of women, workers and peasants. Because America is a free country and that's what freedom means.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you taught chemistry at a university, you taught chemistry at a university which had a chief diversity officer, a department of African-American Studies, etc, etc. You knew what these people were. You knew what these people did. At least, you knew that whatever it was, it was not scholarship. You said nothing. What kind of servant of truth are you, sir? You served not truth, but the Party. Sign the form, sir.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't think the conversion of Southern slaves into Southern sharecroppers made anyone much freer, because it created few practical options for the people involved. Before, you were an agricultural laborer who worked on the same farm for your entire life; after, ditto.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Moderation is not an ideology. It is not an opinion. It is not a thought. It is an absence of thought. If you believe the status quo of 2007 is basically righteous, then you should believe the same thing if a time machine transported you to Vienna in 1907. But if you went around Vienna in 1907 saying that there should be a European Union, that Africans and Arabs should rule their own countries and even colonize Europe, that any form of government except parliamentary democracy is evil, that paper money is good for business, that all doctors should work for the state, etc., etc.—well, you could probably find people who agreed with you. They wouldn't call themselves "moderates", and nor would anyone else.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I hope you can agree that the Harvard faculty in 2007 by and large believes in human equality, social justice, world peace, and community leadership, that the faculty of the same institution held much the same beliefs in 1957, 1907, 1857, and 1807, and that in any of these years they would have described these views as the absolute cynosure of Christianity. Perhaps I am just naturally suspicious, but it strains my credulity slightly to believe that sometime in 1969, the very same beliefs were rederived from pure reason and universal ethics, whose concurrence with the New Testament is remarkable to say the least.”
Curtis Yarvin (born 1973) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Rawlsian god: cryptocalvinism in action", Unqualified Reservations (June 28, 2007).