Best 12 quotes of Revilo P. Oliver on MyQuotes

American Conservatism is finished, and its remaining adherents are, whether they know it or not, merely ghosts wandering, mazed, in the daylight.

A political philosophy (often called "political science" by practitioners who are not averse from verbal trickery) must deal with contemporary realities. If it does not, if it is charged with "ideals," it is merely a variety of romantic fiction, although it may not be recognized as such.

As late as the summer of 1941, the Atlantic Monthly, then a still respected magazine for literates and edited by White men, published a long article by Albert Jay Nock, in which he proved that the Jews are an Oriental race that is incompatible with ours. He was not punished and the magazine was not destroyed, strange and almost incredible as that seems today.

As Spengler observed, all urbanized societies seem to develop a subconscious death wish, making individuals indifferent to the survival of their families and their race.

Every campus, of course, also has its rabble of young "liberals," who are forever making a din as they "demonstrate" for "world peash," "snivel rights," and the like, and who, if we may judge from their appearance and their yammering, are as afraid of war as they are of soap. I am sure that every student here present fully understands the importance of staying on the good side of the young "intellectuals" - I mean the windward side, of course.

History, in other words, is just a device to be used by well-paid boobherds to drive the American cattle in bovine content to their pastures or to the abattoir.

It is a truism, of course, that in "democratic" states the populace must be encouraged to imagine that it makes important decisions by voting, and must therefore be controlled by suitable propaganda, which implants ideas to which the voters respond as automatically as trained animals respond to words of command in a circus, thus leaving to the masses only a factitious choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee on the basis of their preference for a certain kind of oratory, a hair-style, or a particular facial expression.

Now I admit that the notion of a warless world is a pleasant and attractive thought. But people who believe that there can be such a thing should ask it of Santa Claus, in whom they doubtless also believe.

Our idealists must own that their velleity to abolish all suffering is most fully expressed in the Fifth Wisdom of Lamaism, the doctrine that teaches that "no durable happiness, nor yet security, for any sentient being can exist while others are a prey to suffering." That truth cannot be questioned and you may take it to heart: in practical terms it means we got ourselves born on the wrong planet - in the wrong universe.

The most beautiful conception of immortality of which I know, and certainly one that by contrast shows the utter vulgarity of Christian ideas, is set forth in Pindar's second Olympian: after three or six lives in which a man has lived with strict justice and perfect integrity, he passes beyond the tower of Cronus to the fair realm that cannot be reached by land or sea, where gentle breezes from a placid ocean blow forever on the fields of asphodel. For a description, see Pindar. If the beauty of great poetry can commend a religion, here you have it.

When the veil of fiction was rent, man shuddered before "Nature, red in tooth and claw." Nature had always been that and always will be, and the hands of man, even when he fashions and defends the noblest civilization, must forever be bloody hands, for this is a world in which only the strong and resolute nations survive, while the weak, especially the morally weak, who babble about brotherhood and peace, are biologically degenerate and doomed to extinction.

What worries me is that common sense seems to be dwindling to the point of extinction. The minds of men whom our contemporaries consider educated are regressing to the level of the most ignorant peasant on a Mediaeval manor. There is something terrifying in the spectacle of men who hold degrees in the genuine sciences and assemble vast arrays of elaborate scientific equipment to “prove” the authenticity of a “Holy Shroud,” and thus make it necessary to assemble more equipment and conduct long and painstaking research to prove what any half-way educated and rational man would have known from the very first. And the same sotie is performed whenever some prestidigitator claims that he can bend spoons by thinking about them. Is there any limit to the gullibility of “highly qualified scientists”? I sometimes have a vision of scores of great scientists and tons of elaborate and very expensive laboratory equipment assembled about a pond into which they drop horsehairs to determine whether the percentage that turn into tadpoles is significant by the binomial formula. If hairs from Standard-breeds don’t work, get some from Appaloosas. Then try Percherons and Arabians: their hairs may make tadpoles better. And no one can say that the hairs of horses do not turn into tadpoles until you have made exhaustive scientific tests of hairs from every known breed of horses – and then someone will turn up to prove that the negative results are all wrong, because tadpoles come from the hairs of horses who eat the variety of four-leaved clover that grows in a hidden valley in Afghanistan, so the assembled scientists and their equipment will start all over.