#2,940

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

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 469

#2,938

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 469

#2,937

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

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

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 468

#2,934

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

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 468

#2,932

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

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

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

“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

Envy is the key to more stories than sex.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 467

#2,927

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

Demographic pressure makes people brutish.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 467

#2,925

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

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 467

#2,923

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

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 467

#2,921

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

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 466

#2,919

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 466

#2,918

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

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

Faith is part intuition and part wager.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 466

#2,915

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

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

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 465

#2,912

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 465

#2,911

Boring, like an illustrious foreign visitor.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 465

#2,910

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

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

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

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 465

#2,906

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 464

#2,905

Evening dress is the first step toward civilization.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 464

#2,904

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

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

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 464

#2,901

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 464

#2,900

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 464

#2,899

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 464

#2,898

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

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

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

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

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 463

#2,893

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 463

#2,892

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

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

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 462