Character: Musil

The tragedy of civilization is its senseless activity. Only business! Only achievements! Only conquest! The root of this terrifyingly meaningless activity lies in ignorance, in the refusal to know what really needs to be done.

In the place of the spirit, we have elevated the intellect, which means that we have chosen confrontation, but not community. War and loneliness are the fruits that we naturally have to reap.

In the course of time, responsibility was blamed on thunder, on witches, on socialists, intellectuals, generals, or Jews. It is time to understand: responsibility lies with civilization itself.

Whoever wants to build his relationship with a person on stone, and not on sand, should use only the lowest properties and passions, for only that which is closely related to egoism is stable and can be taken into account; higher aspirations are unreliable, contradictory and fleeting like the wind.

Money is a spiritualized violence, a special, flexible, highly developed and creative form of violence.

A society that neglects egoism or does not organize it into a hierarchy is doomed.

Selfishness is the most reliable property of human life. With his help, the politician, the soldier and the king ordered the world. This is the main melody of humanity.

Apart from the losers and the lucky ones, all people live equally badly, but they live badly on different floors.

Since the world has stood, nothing has arisen solely from spiritual purity and good impulses, but everything only from meanness, which over time grinds off its horns, so that in the end, even these great and pure thoughts are obtained from it!

The human being is equally capable of cannibalism and criticism of pure reason.