The Forest Passage Quotes

“It is the natural ambition of the power holder to cast a criminal light on legal resistance and even non-acceptance of its demands, and this aim gives rise to specialized branches in the use of force and the related propaganda. One tactic is to place the common criminal on a higher level than the man who resists their purposes.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“When all institutions have become equivocal or even disreputable, and when open prayers are heard even in churches not for the persecuted but for the persecutors, at this point moral responsibility passes into the hands of individuals, or, more accurately, into the hands of any still unbroken individuals.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“None of us can know today if tomorrow morning we will not be counted as part of a group considered outside the law. In that moment the civilized veneer of life changes, as the state props of well-being disappear and are transformed into omens of destruction. The luxury liner becomes a battleship, or the black jolly roger and the red executioner’s flag are hoisted on it.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“This indicates how far the law has become dubious. People have a sense of being under foreign occupation, and in this relation the criminal appears a kindred soul.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“Not so the forest rebel. He has a tough decision to make: to reserve the right—at any cost—to judge for himself what he is called upon to support or contribute to. There will be considerable sacrifices, but they will be accompanied by an immediate gain in sovereignty. Naturally, as things stand, only a tiny minority will perceive the gain as such. Dominion, however, can only come from those who have preserved in themselves a knowledge of native human measures and who will not be forced by any superior power to forsake acting humanely.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“Preserving one’s true nature is arduous—and the more so when one is weighed down with goods.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“Long periods of peace foster certain optical illusions: one is the conviction that the inviolability of the home is grounded in the constitution, which should guarantee it. In reality, it is grounded in the family father, who, sons at his side, fills the doorway with an axe in hand.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“Still more important is the consideration that in many people today a strong need for religious ritual coexists with an aversion to churches. There is a sense of something missing in existence, which explains all the activity around gnostics, founders of sects, and evangelists, who all, more or less successfully, step into the role of the churches. One might say that a certain definite quantity of religious faith always exists, which in previous times was legitimately satisfied by the churches. Now, freed up, it attaches itself to all and everything. This is the gullibility of modern man, which coexists with a lack of faith. He believes what he reads in the newspaper but not what is written in the stars.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“Of course, no one is easier to terrorize than the person who believes that everything is over when his fleeting phenomenon is extinguished.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“In our present age, each day can bring shocking new manifestations of oppression, slavery, or extermination—whether aimed at specific social groupings or spread over entire regions. Exercising resistance to this is legal, as an assertion of basic human rights, which, in the best cases, are guaranteed in constitutions but which the individual has nevertheless to enforce.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“This is an important difference. It turns the questioning into something closer to an interrogation.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“They are interested not in our solutions but in our answers.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“Die Ärzte zu meiden, sich auf die Wahrheit des Körpers zu verlassen, doch freilich ihrer Stimme auch zu lauschen, ist für den Gesunden das beste Rezept. Das gilt auch für den Waldgänger, der sich auf Lagen zu rüsten hat, in denen alle Krankheiten zum Luxus gerechnet werden, außer den tödlichen. Welche Meinung man immer von dieser Welt der Krankenkassen, Versicherungen, pharmazeutischen Fabriken und Spezialisten hegen möge: stärker ist jener, der auf das alles verzichten kann.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“Each individual must know if freedom is more important to them—know whether they value how they are more than that they are.14”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“Only a miracle can save us from such whirlpools. This miracle has happened, even countless times, when a man stepped out of the lifeless numbers to extend a helping hand to others.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“The I recognizes itself in the other, following the age-old wisdom, “Thou art that.” This other may be a lover, or it may be a brother, a fellow sufferer, or a defenseless neighbor. By helping in this manner, the I also benefits itself in the eternal. And with this the basic order of the universe is confirmed.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“but rather with a concentration of being, and with that we enter a different order.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

“We may be certain that, by the logic of double-entry accounting, these two percent will reappear in other records than the election statistics, for instance in the registers of penitentiaries and penal labor camps, or in those places where God alone counts the victims.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage