“Whoever lies in the language of words gives himself away in the language of gestures, which he does not notice”;

“For a true thinker there are no absolutely correct or incorrect points of view”;

“The broader the franchise, the less power the electorate has”;

“The bird’s-eye view has been replaced by the frog’s-eye view”;

“A culture, as it dies, turns into a civilisation”;

“Books are nothing if they are not alive and effective in people who have grown up to understand them”;

“In the near future three or four world newspapers will direct the opinions of provincial newspapers and, through them, the ‘will of the people’”;

“A war can be lost before the first shot is fired, because by then the press has already won it”;

“To understand history is to be a connoisseur of people in the highest sense of the word”;

“All great cultures are urban cultures… world history is the history of the urban man. Peoples, states, politics and religion, all the arts, all the sciences rest on the single prime phenomenon of human existence, on the city”.

(Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was a German historian, philosopher, sociologist, mathematician and writer, author of the seminal work The Decline of the West. He met Hitler in person but was disappointed.)

Spengler believed that the world war was the beginning of the agony of European civilisation. In his book The Decline of the West he wrote that every culture, once it exhausts its inner creative possibilities, grows dead and passes into the phase of civilisation, which is a crisis outcome, the completion of any culture, and is characterised by atheism and materialism, aggressive expansion abroad, radical revolutionism, scientism and technicism, and also urbanisation. In the world city there is no people, only a mass.

Spengler argued in his book that cultures, like living organisms, pass through the stages of birth, growth, decline and death. In his view, Western culture, having passed through its stage of flowering, has entered the stage of decline, passing into civilisation, which means its inevitable degradation and death.

Spengler predicted the decline and transformation of Western culture into civilisation, which in his view is the inevitable and final stage of its existence. In his work he describes the signs of this decline: a crisis of faith, rationalism, dehumanisation, the loss of spiritual values and the growth of pragmatism.

He draws a clear distinction between culture as a creative and spiritual principle and civilisation as a mechanical and materialistic one. Spengler predicted the collapse of Western civilisation in a hundred years (he wrote The Decline of the West in 1918) and its conquest by the rapidly developing “young” peoples who, at the beginning of the 20th century, were in a pre-cultural state.