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Keeping a journal: The short entries are often as dry as instant tea. Writing them down is like pouring hot water over them to release their aroma.
Ernst Junger -
The anarch knows the rules. He has studied them as a historian and goes along with them as a contemporary. Wherever possible, he plays his own game within their framework; this makes the fewest waves.
Ernst Junger
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The political trend is always to be observed, partly as a spectacle, partly for one's own safety. The liberal is dissatisfied with regime; the anarch passes through their sequence - as inoffensively as possible - like a suite of rooms. This is the recipe for anyone who cares more about the substance of the world than its shadow - the philosopher, the artist, the believer.
Ernst Junger -
A general is a specialist insofar as he has master his craft. Beyond that and outside the arbitrary pro and con, he keeps a third possibility intact and in reserve: his own substance. He knows more than what he embodies and teaches, has other skills along with the ones for which he is paid. He keeps all that to himself; it is his property. It is set aside for his leisure, his soliloquies, his nights. At a propitious moment, he will put it into action, tear off his mask. So far, he has been racing well; within sight is the finish line, his final reserves start pouring in. Fate challenges him; he responds. The dream, even in an erotic encounter, comes true. But causally, even here; every goal is a transition for him. The bow should snap rather than aiming the arrow at a finite target.
Ernst Junger -
... I could not bank on the phlegmatic Chinese; I would have to take care of it myself. This would be safer and also consistent with my own responsibility. The latter is the anarch’s ultimate authority.
Ernst Junger -
.. I, as an anarch, renouncing any bond, any limitation of freedom, also reject compulsory education as nonsense. It was one of the greatest well-springs of misfortune in the world.
Ernst Junger -
Freedom is based on the anarch’s awareness that he can kill himself. He carries this awareness around; it accompanies him like a shadow that he can conjure up. A leap from this bridge will set me free.
Ernst Junger -
But we have never stopped it war and never shall, because war is not the law of one age or civilization, but of eternal nature itself, out of which every civilization proceedes, and into which it must sink again if it is not hard enough to withstand its iron ordeal.
Ernst Junger
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Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.
Ernst Junger -
His death brings new experience to my life - that of a wound that will not heal.
Ernst Junger -
The hardiest sons of the war, the men who lead the storm-troop, and manipulate the tank, the aeroplane, and the submarine, are preeminent in technical accomplishment; and it is these picked examples of dare-devil courage that represent the modern state i battle. These men of first-rate qualities with real blood in their veins, courageous, intelligent, accustomed to serve the machine, and yet its superior at the same time, are the men, too, who show up best in the trench and among the shell-holes.
Ernst Junger -
History is the footsteps of free men towards destiny.
Ernst Junger