Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn Quotes & Sayings

The state has an "annexationist" character tending toward centralization and the development of a Provider State. We must uphold the principle of subsidiarity. Action should always be taken by the smallest possible unit. starting with the person. What we now have is maximal government of the lowest quality; what we need is minimal government of the highest order. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Equality doesn't exist in nature and therefore can be established only by force. He who wants geographic equality has to dynamite mountains and fill up the valleys. To get a hedge of even height one has to apply pruning shears. To achieve equal scholastic levels in a school one would have to pressure certain students into extra hard work while holding back others. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Sometime in the coming century, people will rack their brains pondering how nations with tremendous scientific and intellectual achievements could have given uninstructed and untrained men and women the right to vote equally uninstructed and untrained people into responsible positions. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

People are rarely diabolic or bent enthusiastically on evil. As a rule, they are only weak; they cannot resist temptation and thus give way to their evil drives. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Modern man is a hard driven nomad without any stability, not (as the Bible has it) a wanderer or a pilgrim, but a refugee-an escapist. Instead of meditation and reflection there is only speed, fear and distraction. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

it suffices to say that the artificial establishment of equality is as little compatible with liberty as the enforcement of unjust laws of discrimination. (It is obviously just to discriminate - within limits - between the innocent and the criminal, the adult and the infant, the combatant and the civilian, and so on.) Whereas greed, pride and arrogance are at the base of unjust discrimination, the driving motor of the egalitarian and identitarian trends is envy, jealousy2 and fear. "Nature" (i.e., the absence of human intervention) is anything but egalitarian; if we want to establish a complete plain we have to blast the mountains away and fill the valleys; equality thus presupposes the continuous intervention of force which, as a principle, is opposed to freedom. Liberty and equality are in essence contradictory. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

There is no such thing as a historical fatality; there is only a historical nemesis which punishes those who have hesitated to act when action was still possible. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

To accuse nations (not leaders or governments) is the hallmark of the demo-nationalist of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries; it leads to endless hatreds, feelings of revenge, misunderstandings, and frictions. It is the surest guarantee for perpetual mass wars. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Who is secure in all his basic needs? Who has work, spiritual care, medical care, housing, food, occasional entertainment, free clothing, free burial, free everything? The answer might be nuns and monks, but the standard reply is 'prisoners'. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Only a person with convictions has a genuine possibility to be tolerant. He who accepts no absolute values but clings to polite doubt cannot be tolerant but merely indifferent. He is morally defenseless in the face of evil. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Tolerance can be exercised only by those who have well-grounded convictions (although it will not always be exercised even by them). For such people tolerance is an act of self-abnegation; although they are convinced that those who differ from them must be wrong, they nevertheless will protect their rights. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Russian bolshevism, replacing eastern Christendom by the grim religiosity of Marx, produced a caricature of the evangelical counsels with many a diabolical aspect. There is a good deal of "communism" in monasteries and convents, yet this is based upon a voluntary renunciation of perfect human rights. On account of our free will we can make supreme sacrifices which ennobles our very existence. Bolshevism on the other hand forces us brutally into a parody of monastic life amidst fellow monks and fellow nuns who hate their habit and sigh under the ferocious tyranny of their pseudo-abbot. This evil distortion of an otherwise Christian ideal is more satanic than wanton, a thoroughly pagan and diabolic opposition to Christian existence. This explains also the reason why the Vatican has found stronger words against "altruistic" bolshevism than against egoistic capitalism — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

[T]he democratic principle of "one man, one vote," viewed against a background of voting masses numbering several millions, only serves to demonstrate the pitiful helplessness of the inarticulate individual, who functions at the polls as the smallest indivisible arithmetical (and not always algebraic) unit. He acts in total anonymity, secrecy and legal irresponsibility. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

The farmer was and remains the stumbling block to socialist experiments everywhere. Since he raises his own food and tends to live in his own house, he is less "controllable" than say, the urban dweller. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

The man in a free society must either blame himself (which leads to the melancholia of those plagued by inferiority complexes) or will be bound to accuse imaginary conspiraces of ill-wishers and downright enemies. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

It is the low drive for sameness and the hatred of otherness that characterizes all forms of leftism, which inevitably are totalitarian ... — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

If there is no personal God,everything is permissablel, and if God exists,everthing is possible. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

As humanism begins to dominate the state, the consequence is complete hostile annexation of the church or persecution by separation. Religion is then removed from the marketplace and the school, later from other domains of public life. The state will not toerlate any gods besides itself. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Democratism and its allied herd movements, while remaining loyal to the principle of equality and identity, will never hesitate to sacrifice liberty. — Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn