Don Colacho’s Aphorisms

Welcome to Don Colacho’s Aphorisms!

2011-03-24T21:39:00.006-05:00

Welcome to Don Colacho’s Aphorisms!

Although this blog no longer publishes new material, you are still invited to take a look around.

For information about the aim of this blog as well as about how to navigate it, start here.

#2,988

2011-03-20T20:00:00.004-05:00

Writing is the only way to distance oneself from the century in which it was one’s lot to be born.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 477

#2,987

2011-03-20T16:00:00.003-05:00

Concerning himself intensely with his neighbor’s condition allows the Christian to dissimulate to himself his doubts about the divinity of Christ and the existence of God.
Charity can be the most subtle form of apostasy.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 477

#2,986

2011-03-20T12:00:00.003-05:00

The particular creature we love is never God’s rival. What ends in apostasy is the worship of man, the cult of humanity.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 477

#2,985

2011-03-20T08:00:00.002-05:00

Envy tends to be the true force behind moral indignation.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 477

#2,984

2011-03-20T04:00:00.001-05:00

What is important is not that man believe in the existence of God; what is important is that God exist.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 477

#2,983

2011-03-20T00:00:00.002-05:00

The Gospels and the Communist Manifesto are on the wane; the world’s future lies in the power of Coca-Cola and pornography.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 477

#2,982

2011-03-19T20:00:00.006-05:00

In their childish and vain attempt to attract the people, the modern clergy give socialist programs the function of being schemes for putting the Beatitudes into effect.
The trick behind it consists in reducing to a collective structure external to the individual an ethical behavior that, unless it is individual and internal, is nothing.
The modern clergy preach, in other words, that there is a social reform capable of wiping out the consequences of sin.
From which one can deduce the pointlessness of redemption through Christ.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 476

#2,981

2011-03-19T16:00:00.001-05:00

The voter does not even vote for what he wants; he only votes for what he thinks he wants.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 476

#2,980

2011-03-19T12:00:00.003-05:00

It is not just that human trash accumulates in cities—it is that cities turn what accumulates in them into trash.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 476

#2,979

2011-03-19T08:00:00.004-05:00

As they cannot be defined univocally, nor irrefutably demonstrated, so-called “human rights” serve as a pretext for the individual who rebels against a positive law.
The individual has no more rights than the benefit that can be inferred from another’s duty.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 476

#2,978

2011-03-19T04:00:00.001-05:00

Nobody in politics can foresee the consequences either of what he destroys, or of what he constructs.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 475

#2,977

2011-03-19T00:00:00.001-05:00

The contemporary Church prefers to practice an electoral Catholicism.
It prefers the enthusiasm of great crowds to individual conversions.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 475

#2,976

2011-03-18T20:00:00.006-05:00

Where Christianity disappears, greed, envy, and lust invent a thousand ideologies to justify themselves.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 475

#2,975

2011-03-18T16:00:00.002-05:00

The modern metropolis is not a city; it is a disease.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 475

#2,974

2011-03-18T12:00:00.004-05:00

Society until yesterday had notables; today it only has celebrities.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 475

#2,973

2011-03-18T08:00:00.001-05:00

In the modern state there now exist only two parties: citizens and bureaucracy.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 475

#2,972

2011-03-18T04:00:00.001-05:00

Fashion, even more than technology, is the cause of the modern world’s uniformity.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 475

#2,971

2011-03-18T00:00:00.002-05:00

The progressive Christian’s error lies in believing that Christianity’s perennial polemic against the rich is an implicit defense of socialist programs.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 474

#2,970

2011-03-17T20:00:00.005-05:00

History is indeed the history of freedom—not of an essence “Freedom,” but of free human acts and their unforeseeable consequences.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 474

#2,969

2011-03-17T16:00:00.002-05:00

Ever since Wundt, one of the classic places of “disguised unemployment” is the experimental psychology laboratory.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 474

#2,968

2011-03-17T12:00:00.003-05:00

The so highly acclaimed “dominion of man over nature” turned out to be merely an enormous capability to kill.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 474

#2,967

2011-03-17T08:00:00.002-05:00

No one is more insufferable than a man who does not suspect, once in a while, that he might not be right.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 474

#2,966

2011-03-17T04:00:00.002-05:00

Superficial, like the sociological explanation of any behavior.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 474

#2,965

2011-03-17T00:00:00.001-05:00

If one does not believe in God, the only honest alternative is vulgar utilitarianism.
The rest is rhetoric.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 474

#2,964

2011-03-16T20:00:00.004-05:00

A noble society is one where obeying and exercising authority are ethical behaviors, and not mere practical necessities.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 473

#2,963

2011-03-16T16:00:00.003-05:00

That the abandonment of the “what for” in the sciences has been productive is indisputable, but it is an admission of defeat.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 473

#2,962

2011-03-16T12:00:00.004-05:00

Unlimited gullibility is required to be able to believe that any social condition can be improved in any other way than slowly, gradually, and involuntarily.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 473

#2,961

2011-03-16T08:00:00.001-05:00

Nothing upsets the unbeliever as much as defenses of Christianity based on intellectual skepticism and internal experience.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 473

#2,960

2011-03-16T04:00:00.002-05:00

The modern world resulted from the confluence of three independent causal series: the demographic expansion, democratic propaganda, the industrial revolution.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 473

#2,959

2011-03-16T00:00:00.003-05:00

One must beware of those who are said “to have much merit.” They always have some past to avenge.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 473

#2,958

2011-03-15T20:00:00.003-05:00

A bureaucracy ultimately always ends up costing the people more than an upper class.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 472

#2,957

2011-03-15T16:00:00.002-05:00

Compared to the sophisticated structure of every historical fact, Marxism’s generalizations possess a touching naiveté.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 472

#2,956

2011-03-15T12:00:00.004-05:00

The modern clergy believe they can bring man closer to Christ by insisting on Christ’s humanity.
Thus forgetting that we do not trust in Christ because He is man, but because He is God.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 472

#2,955

2011-03-15T08:00:00.002-05:00

Those who insist on being up to date with today’s fashion are less irritating than those who try too hard when they do not feel that they are up to date with tomorrow’s fashion.
The bourgeoisie is aesthetically more tolerable than the avant-garde.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 472

#2,954

2011-03-15T04:00:00.004-05:00

Modern man calls walking more quickly in the same direction down the same road “change.”
The world, in the last three hundred years, has not changed except in that sense.
The simple suggestion of a true change scandalizes and terrifies modern man.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 472

#2,953

2011-03-15T00:00:00.005-05:00

Historical events stop being interesting the more accustomed their participants become to judging everything in purely secular categories.
Without the intervention of gods everything becomes boring.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 471

#2,952

2011-03-14T20:00:00.003-05:00

If we are ignorant of an epoch’s art, its history is a colorless narrative.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 471

#2,951

2011-03-14T16:00:00.005-05:00

The people that awakes, first shouts, then gets drunk, pillages, [and] murders, and later goes back to sleep.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 471

#2,950

2011-03-14T12:00:00.002-05:00

Why not imagine the possibility, after several centuries of Soviet hegemony, of the conversion of a new Constantine?

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 471

#2,949

2011-03-14T08:00:00.003-05:00

Where the law is not customary law, it is easily turned into a mere political weapon.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 471

#2,948

2011-03-14T04:00:00.004-05:00

The problem of increasing inflation could be solved, if the modern mentality did not put up insurmountable resistance against any attempt to restrain human greed.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 471

#2,947

2011-03-14T00:00:00.004-05:00

The reactionary’s ideal is not a paradisiacal society. It is a society similar to the society that existed in the peaceful intervals of the old European society, of Alteuropa, before the demographic, industrial, and democratic catastrophe.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 470

#2,946

2011-03-13T20:00:00.001-05:00

In modern society, capitalism is the only barrier to the spontaneous totalitarianism of the industrial system.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 470

#2,945

2011-03-13T16:00:00.002-05:00

It is not primitive cults that discredit religion, but American sects.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 470

#2,944

2011-03-13T12:00:00.003-05:00

“Nature” was a pre-Romantic discovery which Romanticism propagated, and which technology is killing in our days.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 470

#2,943

2011-03-13T08:00:00.006-05:00

There exist two interpretations of the popular vote, one democratic, the other liberal.
According to the democratic interpretation what the majority resolves upon is true; according to the liberal interpretation the majority merely chooses one option.
A dogmatic and absolutist interpretation, the one; a skeptical and discreet interpretation, the other.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 470

#2,942

2011-03-13T04:00:00.002-05:00

The secret longing of every civilized society is not to abolish inequality, but to educate it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 469

#2,941

2011-03-13T00:00:00.002-06:00

Except in a few countries, trying to “promote culture” while recommending the reading of “national authors” is a contradictory endeavor.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 469

#2,940

2011-03-12T20:00:00.002-06:00

No thesis is expounded with clarity except when it manages to be expounded by an intelligent man who does not share it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 469

#2,939

2011-03-12T16:00:00.003-06:00

Everything in the world ultimately rests on its own final “just because.”

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 469

#2,938

2011-03-12T12:00:00.003-06:00

Baroque, preciosity, modernism, are noble failings, but failings in the end.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 469

#2,937

2011-03-12T08:00:00.002-06:00

An individual is defined less by his contradictions than by the way he comes to terms with them.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 469

#2,936

2011-03-12T04:00:00.003-06:00

The modern clergy, in order to save the institution, try to rid themselves of the message.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 469

#2,935

2011-03-12T00:00:00.002-06:00

The so-called prejudices of the upper classes tend to consist of accumulated experiences.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 468

#2,934

2011-03-11T20:00:00.003-06:00

There are moments when the worst failing, the worst offense, the worst sin, seems to be bad manners.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 468

#2,933

2011-03-11T16:00:00.002-06:00

The Church used to educate; the pedagogy of the modern world only instructs.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 468

#2,932

2011-03-11T12:00:00.002-06:00

After having been, in the last century, the instrument of political radicalism, universal suffrage is becoming, as Tocqueville foresaw, a conservative mechanism.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 468

#2,931

2011-03-11T08:00:00.003-06:00

Religion is socially effective not when it adopts socio-political solutions, but when it succeeds in having society be spontaneously influenced by purely religious attitudes.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 468

#2,930

2011-03-11T04:00:00.001-06:00

We do not know anything perfectly except what we do not feel capable of teaching.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 468

#2,929

2011-03-11T00:00:00.002-06:00

“To have faith in man” does not reach the level of blasphemy; it is just one more bit of stupidity.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 468

#2,928

2011-03-10T20:00:00.004-06:00

Envy is the key to more stories than sex.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 467

#2,927

2011-03-10T16:00:00.001-06:00

The left claims that the guilty party in a conflict is not the one who covets another’s goods but the one who defends his own.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 467

#2,926

2011-03-10T12:00:00.003-06:00

Demographic pressure makes people brutish.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 467

#2,925

2011-03-10T08:00:00.002-06:00

It is not in the hands of popular majorities where power is most easily perverted; it is in the hands of the semi-educated.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 467

#2,924

2011-03-10T04:00:00.002-06:00

The majority of properly modern customs would be crimes in an authentically civilized society.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 467

#2,923

2011-03-10T00:00:00.002-06:00

The Christian knows with certainty what his personal behavior should be, but he can never state for certain that he is not making a mistake by adopting this or that social reform.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 467

#2,922

2011-03-09T20:00:00.003-06:00

The fool, seeing that customs change, says that morality varies.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 467

#2,921

2011-03-09T16:00:00.003-06:00

In a healthy society, the state is the organ of the ruling class; in a hunchbacked society, the state is the instrument of a bureaucratic class.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 466

#2,920

2011-03-09T12:00:00.002-06:00

Unjust inequality is not remedied by equality, but by just inequality.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 466

#2,919

2011-03-09T08:00:00.001-06:00

Why deceive ourselves? Science has not answered a single important question.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 466

#2,918

2011-03-09T04:00:00.004-06:00

The people is sometimes right when it is frightened; but is always wrong when it becomes enthusiastic.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 466

#2,917

2011-03-09T00:00:00.003-06:00

The golden rule of politics is to make only minimal changes and to make them as slowly as possible.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 466

#2,916

2011-03-08T20:00:00.002-06:00

Faith is part intuition and part wager.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 466

#2,915

2011-03-08T16:00:00.002-06:00

The fragments of the past that survive embarrass the modern landscape in which they stand out.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 466

#2,914

2011-03-08T12:00:00.003-06:00

The peddlers of cultural objects would not be annoying if they did not sell them with the rhetoric of an apostle.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 465

#2,913

2011-03-08T08:00:00.001-06:00

The heresy that threatens the Church, in our time, is “worldliness.”

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 465

#2,912

2011-03-08T04:00:00.002-06:00

The industrialization of agriculture is stopping up the source of decency in the world.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 465

#2,911

2011-03-08T00:00:00.001-06:00

Boring, like an illustrious foreign visitor.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 465

#2,910

2011-03-07T20:00:00.002-06:00

The true Christian should not resign himself to the inevitable: he should trust in the impertinence of a repeated prayer.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 465

#2,909

2011-03-07T16:00:00.002-06:00

Nothing is more irritating than the certainty with which a man who has had success in one thing gives his opinion on everything.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 465

#2,908

2011-03-07T12:00:00.003-06:00

The social sciences abound in problems that are unintelligible by their very nature to both the American professor and the Marxist intellectual.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 465

#2,907

2011-03-07T08:00:00.002-06:00

In addition to civilized societies and semi-civilized societies, there are pseudo-civilized societies.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 465

#2,906

2011-03-07T04:00:00.002-06:00

An education without the humanities prepares one only for servile occupations.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 464

#2,905

2011-03-07T00:00:00.003-06:00

Evening dress is the first step toward civilization.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 464

#2,904

2011-03-06T20:00:00.003-06:00

Modern man lost his soul and is no longer anything but the sum total of his behaviors.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 464

#2,903

2011-03-06T16:00:00.001-06:00

The people today does not feel free except when it feels authorized to respect nothing.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 464

#2,902

2011-03-06T12:00:00.002-06:00

Perfect prose is prose which the ingenuous reader does not notice is well written.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 464

#2,901

2011-03-06T08:00:00.004-06:00

Only the years teach us to deal with our ignorance tactfully.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 464

#2,900

2011-03-06T04:00:00.002-06:00

Monarchs, in almost every dynasty, have been so mediocre that they look like presidents.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 464

#2,899

2011-03-06T00:00:00.002-06:00

Civilization does not conquer definitively: it only celebrates sporadic victories.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 464

#2,898

2011-03-05T20:00:00.003-06:00

Words are born among the people, flourish among writers, and die in the mouth of the middle class.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 463

#2,897

2011-03-05T16:00:00.002-06:00

None of the high points of history has been planned.
The reformer can only be credited with errors.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 463

#2,896

2011-03-05T12:00:00.001-06:00

Educating the individual consists in teaching him to distrust the ideas that occur to him.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 463

#2,895

2011-03-05T08:00:00.001-06:00

It is fine to demand that the imbecile respect arts, letters, philosophy, the sciences, but let him respect them in silence.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 463

#2,894

2011-03-05T04:00:00.001-06:00

Whereas contemporaries read only the optimist with enthusiasm, posterity rereads the pessimist with admiration.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 463

#2,893

2011-03-05T00:00:00.001-06:00

Man’s full depravity does not become clear except in great urban agglomerations.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 463

#2,892

2011-03-04T20:00:00.003-06:00

The principle of inertia and the notion of natural selection eliminated the necessity of attributing meaning to facts, but they did not demonstrate that meaning does not exist.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 463

#2,891

2011-03-04T16:00:00.002-06:00

I have seen philosophy gradually fade away between my skepticism and my faith.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 462

#2,890

2011-03-04T12:00:00.002-06:00

“Escapism” is the imbecile’s favorite accusation to make.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 462