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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu citations

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, né Corneliu Zieliński le 13 septembre 1899 à Huși et mort le 30 novembre 1938 vers Snagov, est un homme politique roumain.

Il est le créateur charismatique de la Légion de l'archange Michel, surnommée puis renommée la Garde de fer, organisation nationaliste et anticommuniste de la Roumanie de l'entre-deux-guerres.

Appelé « Căpitanul » par ses camarades, il est assassiné sur ordre du gouvernement libéral d'Armand Călinescu, alors que la Garde de fer gagne en influence politique. Wikipedia  

✵ 13. septembre 1899 – 30. novembre 1938
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu photo
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu: 66   citations 0   J'aime

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu: Citations en anglais

“The law of honor: Go along only on the paths of honor. Fight, and never be a coward. Leave the path of infamy to others. Better to fall in an honorable fight than win by infamy.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

“The young man who joins a political party is a traitor to his generation and to his race.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

“I started with an impulse of my heart, with that instinct of defense which even the least of the worms has, not with the instinct of personal self-preservation, but of defense of the race to which I belong. This is why I have always had the feeling that the whole race rests on our shoulders, the living, and those who died for the Fatherland, and our entire future, and that the race struggles and speaks through us, that the hostile flock, however huge, in relation to this historical entity, is only a handful of human detritus which we will disperse and defeat… The individual in the framework and in the service of his race, the race in the framework and in the service of God and of the laws of the divinity: those who will understand these things will win even though they are alone. Those who will not understand will be defeated.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture

“The law of silence: Speak little. Say only what you must. Speak only when necessary. Your oratory should be deeds, not words. You accomplish: let others talk.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

The Nest Leader's Manual (1933)

“Is it not frightening, that we, the Romanian people, no longer can produce fruit? That we do not have a Romanian culture of our own, of our people, of our blood, to shine in the world side by side with that of other peoples? That we be condemned today to present ourselves before the world with products of Jewish essence? That today, at this moment, when the world expects that the Romanian people appear to show the fruit of our national blood and genius, we present ourselves with an infection of Judaic cultural caricature?”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture

“The Legionaries have been called by God to sound the trumpet for the resurrection of Romania after centuries of darkness and oppression.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Religion

“When we speak of the Rumanian nation, we refer not only to the Rumanians currently living on the same territory, with the same past and same future, the same habits, the same language, the same interests. When we speak of the Rumanian nation we refer to all Rumanians, dead or alive, who have lived on this land of ours from the beginnings of history and will live on it also in the future.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture

“Here are two opposite ideas, one containing truth, the other the lie. Truth-of which there can be but one-is sought. The question is put to a vote. One idea polls 10,000 votes, the other 10,050. Is it possible that 50 votes more or less determine or deny truth? Truth depends neither on majority nor minority; it has its own laws and it succeeds, as has been seen, against all majorities, even though they be crushing.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

“Wherever the Legionary’s hand and soul show up, a garden appears.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), The Legion

“That is why we believe that the leading elite of a country cannot be chosen by the multitude. To try to select this elite is like determining by majority vote who the poets, writers, mechanics, aviators or athletes of a country ought to be.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

“We wear the clothes and embrace the forms of democracy. Are they worth anything? We don't know yet. But we do know one thing. We know it for sure. That some of the largest and most civilized nations of Europe have discarded those clothes and have acquired new ones. Did they get rid of them forever? Other nations are doing their best to dispose of them and to get new ones also. Why? Have all nations gone mad? Are the Rumanian politicians the only wise men in the world? Somehow I doubt it.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

“On what must an elite be founded? a) Purity of soul. b) Capacity of work and creativity. c) Bravery. d) Tough living and permanent warring against difficulties facing the nation. e) Poverty, namely voluntary renunciation of amassing a fortune. f) Faith in God. g) Love.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

“Democracy destroys the unity of the Rumanian nation, dividing it among political parties, making Rumanians hate one another, and thus exposing a divided people to the united congregation of Jewish power at a difficult time in the nation's history. This argument alone is so persuasive as to warrant the discarding of democracy in favor of anything that would ensure our unity--or life itself. For disunity means death.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

“A people is not capable of governing itself. It ought to be governed by its elite. Namely, through that category of men born within its bosom who possess certain aptitudes and specialties. Just as the bees raise their "queen" a people must raise its elite. The multitude likewise, in its needs, appeals to its elite, the wise of the state.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

“Its culture: the fruit of its life, the product of its own efforts in thought and art. This culture is not international. It is the expression of the national genius, of the blood. The culture is international in its brilliance but national in origin. Someone made a fine comparison: bread and wheat may be internationally consumed, but they always bear the imprint of the soil from which they came.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture

“We do not remember that our people - during our sad but proud Romanian history - at any time tolerated being dishonoured. Our fields are full of the dead, but not of cowards. Today we are free men with the consciousness of our rights. Slaves we are not and never were. We receive death, but not humiliation. Rest assured, we have sufficient moral strength left to find an honourable exit from a life we cannot support without honour and dignity.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture

“If Christian mysticism and its goal, ecstasy, is the contact of man with God through a leap from human nature to divine nature, national mysticism is nothing other than the contact of man and crowds with the soul of their race through the leap which these forces make from the world of personal and material interests into the outer world of race. Not through the mind, since this anyone can do, but by living with their soul.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Religion

“Besides, large-scale general plans : 1) they will seek to break the bonds between earth and heaven, doing their best to spread, on a large scale, atheistic and materialistic theories, degrading the Romanian people, or even just its leaders, to a people separated from God and its dead, they will kill them, not with the spear, but by cutting the roots of their spiritual life; 2) they will then break the links of the race with the soil, material spring of its wealth, attacking nationalism and any idea of Fatherland and homeland; determined to succeed, they will seek to seize the press; 4) they will use any pretext, since in the Romanian people there are dissensions, misunderstandings, and quarrels, to divide them into as many antagonistic parties as possible; 5) they will seek to monopolise more and more the means of existence of Romanians; 6) they will systematically drive them to dissoluteness, annihilating family and moral force without forgetting to degrade and daze them through alcoholic drinks and other poisons. And, in truth, anyone who would want to kill and conquer a race could do it by adopting this system.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Jewish Problem

“I could not define how I entered into the struggle. Probably like a man who, walking the street, with his preoccupations, his needs and his own thoughts, surprised by the fire which is consuming a house, takes off his jacket and rushes to give help to those who are the prey of flames. With the common sense of a young man of twenty or so, this is the only thing I understood in all I was seeing : that we were losing the Fatherland, that we would no longer have the Fatherland, that, with the unwitting support of the miserable, impoverished and exploited Romanian workers, the Jewish horde would sweep us away.”

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For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture

“Consider the attitude our great Vasile Conta held in the Chamber in 1879. Fifty years earlier the Romanian philosopher demonstrated with unshakeable scientific arguments, framed in a system of impeccable logic, the soundness of racial truths that must lie at the foundation of the national state…”

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For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Nation and Culture

“The new Romanian elite, as well as any other elite in the world, must be based on the principle of social selection. In other words, a category of people endowed with certain qualities which they then cultivate, is naturally selected from the nation's body, namely from the large healthy mass of peasantry and workingmen, which is permanently bound to the land and the country. This category of people becomes the national elite meant to lead our nation.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

“Prayer is decisive element of victory. Wars are won by those who have managed to attract from elsewhere, from the skies, the mysterious forces of the invisible world and to secure their support. These mysterious forces are the souls of the dead, the souls of our ancestors, who once were, like us, linked to our clods, to our furrows, who died for the defense of this land and are still linked today to it by the memory of their lives and by us, their sons, their grandsons, their great grandsons. But, above the souls of the dead, there is God. Once these forces are attracted, they are of considerable power, they defend us, they give us courage, will, all the elements necessary to victory and which make us win. They bring in panic and terror among the enemies, paralyse their activity. In the last analysis, victories do not depend only on material preparation, on the material forces of the belligerents, but on their power to secure the support of spiritual forces. The fairness and the morality of actions and the fervent, insistent call for them in the form of rite and collective prayer attract such forces.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Religion

“At Posada, Calugareni, on the Olt, jiu and. Cerna rivers, at Turda; in the mountains of the unhappy and forgotten Moti of Vidra, all the way to Huedin and Alba-Iulia (the torture place of Horia and his brothers-in-arms), there are everywhere testimonies of battles and tombs of heroes. All over the Carpathians, from the Oltenian mountains at Dragoslavele and at Predeal, from Oituz to Vatra Dornei, on peaks and in valley bottoms, everywhere Romanian blood flowed like rivers. In the middle of the night, in difficult times for our people, we hear the call of the Romanian soil urging us to battle. I ask and I expect an answer: By what right do the Jews wish to take this land from us? On what historical argument do they base their pretensions and particularly the audacity with which they defy us Romanians, here in our own land? We are bound to this land by millions of tombs and millions of unseen threads that only our soul feels, and woe to those who shall try to snatch us from it.”

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For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Jewish Problem

“Therefore, in the last analysis, the problem facing the Romanian people today, on which all others depend, is the substitution of this fake elite with a real national one based on virtue, love and sacrifice for country, justice and love for the people, honesty, work, order, discipline, honest dealing, and honor.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

“In one year I learned as much about anti-Semitism as would be enough for three mens' lifetimes. For you cannot wound the sacred convictions of a people, what their heart loves and respects, without causing deep pain and shedding the heart's blood. It was 17 years ago, and my heart bleeds yet.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Jewish Problem

“Legionary life is beautiful, not because of riches, partying or the acquisition of luxury, but because of the noble comradeship which binds all Legionaries in a sacred brotherhood of struggle.”

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For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), The Legion

“The Politician's goal is to build a fortune, ours is to build our homeland flowering and strong. For her we will work and we will build. For her we will make each Romanian a hero, ready to fight, ready to sacrifice, ready to die.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

The Nest Leader's Manual (1933)

“Then legionaries wrote down several maxims I collected either from the Gospels or from other writings. They embelished our walls. Here are some of them: "God carries us on His victorious chariot." "Whoever wins…. I shall be his God." "He who does not have a sword, let him sell his cloak and buy one." "Fight bravely for faith." "Avoid carnal pleasures, for they kill the soul." "Be vigilant." "Do not destroy the hero that is in you." "Brothers in fortune… as in misfortune." "Whoever knows how to die, will never be a slave."”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

"I await the resurrection of my Fatherland and the destruction of the hordes of traitors," etc.
For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), The Legion

“Those who think that the Jews are poor unfortunates, arrived here by chance, carried by the wind, led by fate, and so on, are mistaken. All the Jews who exist on the face of the earth form a great community, bound by blood and Talmudic religion. They are parts of a truly implacable state, which has laws, plans and leaders who formulate these plans and carry them through. The whole thing is organised in the form of a so-called 'Kehillah'. This is why we are faced, not with isolated Jews, but with a constituted force, the Jewish community. In any of our cities or countries where a given number of Jews are gathered, a Kehillah is immediately set up, that is to say the Jewish community. This Kehillah has its leaders, its own judiciary, and so on. And it is in this small Kehillah, whether at the city or at the national level, that all the plans are formed : how to win the local politicians, the authorities; how to work one's way into circles where it would be useful to get admitted, for example, among the magistrates, the state employees, the senior officials; these plans must be carried out to take a certain economic sector away from a Romanian's hands; how an honest representative of an authority opposed to the Jewish interests could be eliminated; what plans to apply, when, oppressed, the population rebels and bursts in anti-Semitic movements.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Jewish Problem

“There is, among all those various parts of the world who serve their people, a kinship of sympathy, as there is such a kinship among those who labour for the destruction of peoples.”

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Corneliu Zelea Codreanu

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Jewish Problem

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