“Distinctions between bodily structure and way of life are only anatomists’ distinctions; if we start from the inner form of the life instead of that of the body, tactics of living and the organisation of the body appear as one and the same, both being expressions of one organic actuality.”

“Every machine serves some one process and owes its existence to thought about this process. All our means of transport have developed out of the ideas of driving and rowing, sailing and flying, and not out of any concept such as that of a wagon or of a boat. Methods themselves are weapons. And consequently technics is in no wise a ‘part’ of economics, any more than economics (or, for that matter, war or politics) can claim to be a self-contained ‘part’ of life. They are all just sides of one active, fighting, and charged life.”

“Every struggle to overcome a problem has its own logical technique. There is a technique of the painter’s brush-strokes, of horsemanship, of navigating an airship. Always it is a matter of purposive activity, never of things. And it is just this that is so often overlooked in the study of prehistory, in which far too much attention is paid to things in museums and far too little to the innumerable processes that must have been in existence, even though they may have vanished without leaving a trace.”

“Man is no simpleton, ‘naturally good’ and stupid, and not a semi-ape with technical tendencies, as Haeckel describes him and Gabriel Max portrays him. Over these caricatures there still falls the plebeian shadow of Rousseau.

No, the tactics of his living are those of a splendid beast of prey, brave, crafty, and cruel. He lives by attacking and killing and destroying. He wills, and has willed ever since he existed, to be master.”

“The animal of prey is the highest form of mobile life. It implies a maximum of freedom from others and for oneself, of self-responsibility, of independence, and an extreme of necessity where that self can hold its own only by fighting and winning and destroying. It imparts a high dignity to Man, as a type, that he is a beast of prey.”

“There are no ‘men-in-themselves’ such as the philosophers prattle about, but only men of a time, of a locality, of a race, of a personality type, who contend in battle with the given world and through or fail, while the universe moves slowly on with a godlike unconcern. This battle is life, and life in the true Nietzschean sense of a cruel, pitiless, relentless battle deriving from the Will to Power.”

“Without an economic wealth that is concentrated in a few hands, there can be no ‘wealth’ of art, of thought, or of elegance, not to speak of the luxury of possessing a worldview and of thinking theoretically instead of practically. Economic impoverishment at once brings spiritual and artistic impoverishment in its train.”