« Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power. »
— Eric Hoffer
« People run in packs because they don't feel safe alone.
I run alone because I don't feel safe in packs. »
— Muhammad Ali
« Nothing is more dangerous than a general idea in narrow and empty minds.»
— Hippolyte Taine.
The French Revolution. Volume 3
« The eternal truths and rights of things exist, fortunately, independent of our thoughts
or wishes, fixed as mathematics, inherent in the nature of man and the world.
They are no more to be trifled with than gravitation. »
— J. A. Froude, Inaugural Address at St. Andrews, 1869, 41
« The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is,
ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department. »
— Thomas Sowell
« Talkers are usually more articulate than doers, since talk is their specialty. »
— Thomas Sowell
« The purpose of abstracting is not to be vague, but to create a
new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise. »
— Edsger W. Dijkstra
« Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity,
and higher education positively fortifies it. »
— Stephen Vizinczey
"An Innocent Millionaire"
« Here comes the time, when people will behave like madmen, and
if they see anybody who does not behave like that, they will rebel
against him and say: "You are mad", - because he is not like them. »
— St. Anthony the Great
« Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that
there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. »
— John Kenneth Galbraith
« Obstinate ignorance is usually a manifestation of underlying political motives. »
— Michał Kalecki
"Political Aspects of Full Employment" 1942
« The intellectual is so often an imbecile that we should always take him for one until he proves the contrary. »
— Georges Bernanos
« The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. »
— Winston Churchill
« Thinking without constructive action becomes a disease. »
— Henry Ford
« In the reconstruction of any past incident, no matter how logically consistent the facts,
there are always some hidden gaps which, when filled, cast everything in a different light.
If the effort is seldom made, it is because people are more content to rely on what is
immediately taken for granted.»
― Czesław Miłosz "The Issa Valley"
« A man who does not know what has been thought by those who have gone before him
is sure to set an undue value upon his own ideas. »
— Mark Pattison, Memoirs, 78
« Vision is the art of seeing things invisible. »
— Johathan Swift
« Wherever human beings are concerned, trend is not destiny. »
— René Dubos
« Sow, Father Simon, sow! Sow everywhere the wheat that has been given to you.
This seed in the good land, this in the sand, this on the rock, this in the way, this in the thorns.
Somewhere or other, it will sprout and grow and bear fruit, although not soon. »
— Saint Seraphim of Sarov
« It is never late to be what you might have been. »
— George Eliot, "Middlemarch"
« Where there are no men, be thou a man. »
— Rabbi Hillel
« As Pascal says, judges need their wigs and robes, priests their vestments,
scholars their gowns — for that matter, hippies their long hair and fancy dress;
otherwise, the fraudulence of their pretentions would be all too apparent. »
— Malcolm Muggeridge,
Chronicles of Wasted Time. An Autobiography
« Eschew stereotypes and labels. The words you employ may fail you.
Trying to squeeze things into preconceived categories, you prevent
yourself from seeing the true meaning of these things. »
— Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch
« People demand freedom of speech as a compensation
for the freedom of thought, which they seldom use. »
— Soren Kierkegaard
"Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation
from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit."
— Somerset Maugham
« They danced round the room, slowly, talking very little, with all their attention given to the dance.
... It seemed to Philip that they had thrown off the guard which people wear on their expression,
the homage to convention, and he saw them now as they really were. ... There was nothing of
nobility in their bearing, and you felt that for all of them life was a long succession of petty
concerns and sordid thoughts. »
― W. Somerset Maugham. "Of Human Bondage"
« He was a man who saw nothing for himself, but only through a literary atmosphere, and
he was dangerous because he had deceived himself into sincerity. He honestly mistook
his sensuality for romantic emotion, his vacillation for the artistic temperament, and his
idleness for philosophic calm. His mind, vulgar in its effort at refinement, saw everything
a little larger than life size, with the outlines blurred, in a golden mist of sentimentality.
He lied and never knew that he lied, and when it was pointed out to him said that lies were
beautiful. He was an idealist. »
― W. Somerset Maugham
"Of Human Bondage", Chapter XXIX
« Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and, oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth.
A really good, out-and-out, `reactionary' journal is like a breath of fresh air in the midst of this turbulent,
pretentious, childish optimism. »
— Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957)
« History never repeats itself, but the kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present
often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends. »
— Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
The Guilded Age: A Tale of Today, chapter 47 (1873)
From « Scholia to an Implicit Text » , by Nicolás Gómez Dávila:
« Anguish over the decline of civilisation is the affliction of a conservative.
The leftist cannot lament the disappearance of something of which he is ignorant. »
« Boundless tolerance is nothing but a hypocritical form of surrender. »
« Being a reactionary is not about believing in certain solutions,
but about having an acute sense of the complexity of the problems. »
« In contemporary society, holding revolutionary opinions is the only profession
that ensures a respectable, profitable, and untroubled social status. »
« Love of poverty is Christian, but flattery of the poor is a mere technique of electoral recruitment. »
« A barbarian either mocks altogether or altogether venerates.
Civilisation is a smile in which irony and respect mix unobtrusively. »
« Total freedom of expression does not compensate for lack of talent. »
« The itch to be original is an affectation caused by a lack of talent. »
« The modernist thirst for originality misleads mediocre artist into believing
that the secret of originality lies simply in being different. »
« To be authentically modern is, in each and every age, a sign of mediocrity. »
« The word "modern" no longer has an automatic prestige except among fools. »
« The problems of only his time seem important to the fool. »
« To be intelligent without ideas is the privilege of the artist. »
« The racist is annoyed because he secretly suspects that the races are equal. The anti-racist is annoyed because he secretly suspects that they are not. »
« Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies. »
« Whoever says that he "belongs to his time" is only saying that he agrees with the largest number of fools at that moment. »
« An excess of humility risks dragging us into depths of baseness.
Just because we were denied the air of the peaks does not mean we must dwell in swamps. »
« The reactionary invented the dialogue upon observing differences among men
and the variety of their intentions.
The democrat engages in a monologue, because humanity expresses itself through his mouth. »
« The fact that nothing in this world fulfills us does not prevent us from longing
for a world that is less ignoble and less ugly.
In a well-tended garden the soul observes with nobler tranquility the initial onslaught of winter. »
« The pure reactionary is not a dreamer of abolished pasts, but a hunter of sacred shades
on the eternal hills. »
« The Left does not always kill, but it always lies. »
« The surest ways of winning are more disastrous than any defeat. »
« Benda's hostility towards Bergson is the antipathy of a clergyman towards a
non-priestly tribe prophet. »
« Intelligence consists not in handling intelligent ideas, but in handling any idea intelligently.”
« In the intelligent man, faith is the only remedy for anguish.
The fool is cured by “reason,” “progress,” alcohol, toil. »
« One of the worst intellectual disasters is found in the appropriation
of scientific concepts and vocabulary by mediocre intelligences. »
« Conformism and non-conformism are symmetrical expressions of a lack of originality. »
« Man matures when he stops believing that politics solves his problems. »
« Many love humanity only in order to forget God with a clear conscience. »
« Relativism is the explanation of one who is incapable of putting things in order. »
« Maturity of spirit begins as soon as we cease to feel responsible for the world. »
« Bourgeoisie is any group of individuals who are both displeased with what they have
and satisfied with what they are. »
« Time is less fearsome because it kills than because it exposes. »
« Sentences are pebbles thrown by the writer unto the soul of the reader.
The diameter of the concentric waves thus displaced depends upon the dimensions of the pond. »
« More abhorrent than the future progressivists unwittingly concoct is the future they dream of. »
« An intelligent idea produces sensuous pleasure. »
« Only he who observes, ponders, and speaks it, lives his life — the rest are just lived by their lives. »
« To depend only on the will of God is our true autonomy. »
« Who does not fear that the pettiest of his present moments seems
a lost paradise to his oncoming years? »
« A truthful and austere intellectual life snatches arts, literature, philosophy,
and sciences from our hands and reduces us to a naked confrontation with fate. »
« Nothing is more dangerous than solving transitory problems with permanent solutions. »
« Novels add a third dimension to history. »
« That today the adjective `routine' has become an insult proves our ignorance in the art of living. »
« Growing old is a bodily catastrophe that our cowardliness turns into a catastrophe of the soul. »
« A faith unable to laugh at itself must doubt its authenticity. A smile is the solvent of imposture. »
« Today, when we are told that someone has no personality, we can be sure that
he is an unassuming, honest, straightforward human being. »
« The greatest modern mistake is not to proclaim that God has died
but to believe that the Devil is dead. »
« Latin American exuberance is not richness but confusion. »
« `Human' is the adjective that serves to excuse any vile act. »
« Forgetting that a Catholic is a defeated unbeliever, the disbeliever is amazed that
his arguments do not frighten the Catholic. His objections are the pillars of our faith. »
« The democrat champions his convictions by declaring obsolete those who challenge him. »
« Solitude is the laboratory where commonplaces are verified. »
« Christendom does not deny the splendour of the world but invites us to search
for its fountainhead, to ascend towards its unblemished snows. »
« Love is, in essence, the attachment of the spirit to another nude body. »
« My faith fills my solitude with its muffled whisper of invisible life. »
« To educate our soul entails teaching it to transform its enviousness into admiration. »
« Serious books do not instruct but question. »
« Resistance is useless when everything in the world schemes to destroy what we admire.
But we are always left with an incorruptible soul, fit to behold, to judge, and to flout.
« The biblical prophet is not a foreteller of the future but a witness
of the presence of God in history. »
« The intended crime is sometimes so hideous that the pretext of nation
is not enough and it is necessary to invoke that of humanity.
« Man unleashes disasters when determined to make coherent the
contradictory evidences among which he lives. »
« Serenity is the consequence of accepted uncertainty.
« What happens in times of disbelief is not that religious problems seem
to be absurd but that they do not seem to be problems. »
« Legitimate is the power which complies with the mandate conferred upon it
by the vital and ethical needs of a society. »
« When respect to tradition perishes, society — in its unceasing eagerness to renew — devours itself frantically. To avoid a virile confrontation with nothingness, man erects altars to progress. »
« For modern man, catastrophes are not lessons but insolences of the universe. »
« Generational replacement is the vehicle, yet not the motor of history. »
« Modern artists are so eager to be different from one another
that such eagerness groups them into a single species. »
« Mean and poor though it may be, every life contains instants worthy of eternity. »
« Ideas tyranny him who has but a few. »
« It is not hard to find French historians for whom the history of the world is
but an episode of the history of France. »
« Deliberate and systematic originality is the contemporary uniform of mediocrity. »
« To complicate things is the highest birthright of man. »
« Today, a reactionary is just a castaway who sinks with dignity. »
« When we suspect the extent of innateness, we realise that pedagogy is the
technique of the subordinate. We can only truly learn what we were born to know. »
« For fools, obsolete opinion and wrong opinion are synonymous. »
« We who want to accept only what is of value will always seem naive to those who only acknowledge what is in force. »
« Faith is not a conviction we own, but one that possesses us. »
« A brave and daring thought does not shun commonplaces. »
« Any 'explanation' ultimately entails assimilating an unwonted mystery to a familiar one. »
« "Belonging to a generation" is not a necessity but a choice made by gregarious minds. »
« Decay makes many things amiable. »
« If dignity is not enough to commend modesty, vanity should. »
« Aristocracies are proud, but insolence is a plutocratic feature. Plutocrats believe that everything is for sale — aristocrats know that loyalty cannot be bought. »
« Political scientists analyse judiciously the croaks, yelps, grunts of the embarked animals while whirls silently propel the boat to one bank or the other. »
« The frequent barriers which life poses in our way are not obstacles that must be demolished but silent hints deflecting us into the right path. »
« The only societies which prove more hideous than those that enrage young rebels are those which they naively help to create.»
« The celebrities of our time reek of the advertising laboratories where they are produced. »
« The most severe ailments of society usually rise from the rashness with which it prescribes its own remedies. »
« A man can communicate with another man only when one of them writes in his solitude and the other reads him in his.
Conversations are either amusement, swindle, or fencing. »
« Reason, truth, justice are not usually man's goals but only names that he gives to his goals. »
« Deep beliefs are communicated in silence. »
« In the remotest corner of the labyrinth of our soul a scared ape growls. »
« The pleasure with which we traverse the trail that a system blazes for us in the forest makes us forget that the jungle remains untouched at both sides. »
« Faith is not a conviction we must defend, but a conviction against which we cannot defend ourselves. »
« Only he who did not hold out his hand when they were within his reach ought to speak about wealth or power. »
« The most obscene spectacle is that of the voluptuous throbbing with which a rabble listens to the orator who flatters it. »