Notably from Ortega y Gasquet’s book “The Uprising of the Masses”

– Society is always the dynamic unity of two factors: minorities and the masses. Minorities are individuals or groups of individuals with special qualities. So, when we say mass, we should not only mean the “working masses”. Mass is the average person.

– When one speaks of “fine minorities,” it is common for the malicious to distort the meaning of this expression, by doing how he does not know, that the chosen person is not the hunter who thinks himself superior to the others but the one who requires more he himself than the others, even if he did not manage to make those high claims on his face.

– The mass crushes beneath everything that is different, everything that excels, which is charismatic and exquisite. Anyone who is not like everyone, who does not think like everyone else, is in danger of disappearing.

– The History of the Roman Empire is at the same time the history of the rise of the mastery of the masses, which absorb and abolish the leading minorities and put themselves in their place.

– There are centuries that die of self-satisfaction because they do not know how to renew their desires, just as the happy drone dies after the wedding flight.

– In our days we no longer know what is going to happen tomorrow in our world, and this brings us a secret joy because of this weakness of anticipation, this horizon always open to all contingencies, constitutes authentic life, true completeness our existence.

– By destroying them, we give them life, we do them to serve our vital purposes. We can be in more places than we could before, and enjoy more arrivals and departures, to consume more secular time in less vital time.

– The other truth is quite the opposite: we live in a time when a man feels he has mythical abilities to create, but he does not know what to create. The Lord of all is not the master of himself. He feels lost in his abundance.

– That is, it lives from the need of the present, and not from the plan of the future. And so its activity turns out to be the avoidance of the difficulties of the time ‘ not to solve the difficulties, but to escape them at present…

– On the contrary, the eminent man, the extraordinary man, urges, from an inner necessity, to refer, beginning from himself to a pattern beyond himself, superior to himself, to whose service he is free.

– The kindness is defined by the demands imposed on us – by the obligations, not by the rights. Noblesse oblige. ” To live for the satisfaction of his senses Consolidation of his senses is accomplished ” the nobleman strives for the order and the law “(Goethe)

– This is why we use the term “mass” in this type of man – not so much because of his crowd but because of his slowness.

– These are the chosen people, the nobles, the ones who act by action and not by reaction [for outward stimulation], for whom life is an endless effort, an unstoppable course of education. Education = exercise. These are the ascetics.

– Baby is a lifetime baby ‘has no resources. That’s why Athletic Franks said how the baby is much worse than the bad because he’s been resting sometimes, the baby never.

– It does not make sense to talk about ideas unless there is an admission of a higher authority regulating them, a series of rules that you can invoke in a discussion. These rules are the principles underlying culture (culture). I do not care about the form they hire. What I am affirming is that there is no culture(culture) where there are no rules that our partner can appeal to . There is no culture (culture) where there are no principles of innateness, in order to overcome them. There is no culture (culture) where there is no admission of certain final spiritual positions, in which a disagreement may be raised .There is no education when the battle of aesthetic issues does not recognize the necessity of justifying the work of art. When all these things are lacking, there is no education (culture) ‘exists in the most precise meaning of the word, barbarism.

– Under the types of syndicalism and fascism, for the first time in Europe, there is a type of person who does not want to give the reasons for his actions or justify their correctness, but he simply seems determined to impose his opinions. This is the new element: the right to be absurd, or the ” logic of the absurd .”

– Almost all, a homogeneous mass is borne by the public, power and disintegration, annihilates every opposition group. The mass – who would say it, seeing its compact and myrrh-shaped presence? -do not want to share life with those who are not of it. It feeds deadly hatred for what it is not.

– In general , public life and, above all, politics must urgently return to inertia, Europeans will not be able to make the leap that the optimists demand from them, unless they first put their clothes in until they reach their naked essence , and return to their true self.

– This satisfaction with himself leads him to exclude himself from any external criterion, “not to listen, not to put his opinion under suspicion, not to take into account the existence of the other.

– The frontal assault must come in such a way that the massager can not take his precautions against it; he will see it in front of him and will not suspect just how this is the frontal assault.

– The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, because it is exactly convinced that culture will not fail.

– Certainly, on the assumption that our astral person would not search for extraordinary individuals, but would look for the genetic type of the “man of science”, the highest point of the eunuch mankind.
And now it turns out that the scientist is the prototype of the massager. Not by accident, not because of the mass failure of each scientist, but because science itself – the root of our civilization – automatically transforms it into a maze, makes it a primitive, modern barbarian.

– The expert “knows” very well his own, little corner of the world, but ignores the rest of the world radically;

– But our expert cannot fall into any of these categories. He is not educated because he typically ignores everything that does not concern his speciality, but he is neither an uneducated person because he is a “scientist” and “knows” very well his own little piece of the world.

– When the mass acts on its behalf, it does it only in one way, because it has no other: it is a lynching.

– Creative life requires a state of rigorous mental health, high education, fixed incentives that keep active the consciousness of human dignity.

– The city was not built, such as the farmhouse or the Domus, as housing against the weather and the rise of the species – these are personal and family interests – but to discuss public affairs.

– Life is the struggle, the effort to realize yourself.

– A people are capable of creating a state insofar as it is capable of imagining. So it is in all peoples that there is a limit in their evolution towards the State precisely the limit that nature sets in their imagination.

– If you do not wish to be subjected to any rule, you will be forced, nolens volens, to submit to the rule of denial of all morality, and that is not unethicality but immorality.

by SearchingMeaningOfLife