#1,537

The technification of the world blunts one’s sensibility and does not refine one's senses.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 257

#1,536

The current liturgy makes official the secular divorce between the clergy and the arts.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 257

#1,535

The despotic decisions of the modern state are, in the end, made by an anonymous, subordinate, pusillanimous bureaucrat, who is probably also a cuckold.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 257

#1,534

Youths are not necessarily revolutionary but rather necessarily dogmatic.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 257

#1,533

“Social” is the adjective that serves as a pretext for all swindles.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 256

#1,532

Public opinion today is not the sum of personal opinions.
Personal opinions, on the contrary, are the echo of public opinion.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 256

#1,531

The democrat is capable of sacrificing even his interests to his resentments.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 256

#1,530

Adapting to the modern world demands the hardening of one’s sensibility and the debasing of one’s character.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 256

#1,529

Capable men accept degrading themselves in order to triumph.
And eventually they fail because they degraded themselves.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 256

#1,528

Although we may have to yield to the torrent of collective stupidities dragging us along in its current, let us not allow ourselves to be dissolved in its mud.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 256

#1,527

The modern state is the transformation of the apparatus which society developed for its defense into an autonomous organism which exploits it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 256

#1,526

Our soul has a future.
Humanity has none.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 255

#1,525

Revolutions do not solve any problem other than their leaders’ economic problem.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 255

#1,524

The Church will need centuries of prayer and silence to forge anew its flabby soul.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 255

#1,523

I understand that Communism which is a protest, but not that which is a hope.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 255

#1,522

We should admire or detest things for what they are, not for the consequences they may have.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 255

#1,521

The self-important man’s lack of importance is sufficient revenge for us.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 255

#1,520

It is possible to inculcate in the contemporary bourgeois any stupid idea in the name of progress and to sell him any grotesque object in the name of art.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 255

#1,519

The ruling class of an agrarian society is an aristocracy, that of an industrial society an oligarchy.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 255

#1,518

Class struggles are episodes.
The fabric of history is the conflict between equals.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 254

#1,517

Happiness is the prickly flower of intelligent resignation.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 254

#1,516

Sociology protects the sociologist from all contact with reality.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 254

#1,515

The left’s ideas produce revolutions; revolutions produce the right’s ideas.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 254

#1,514

When the modern consciousness suspends its economic routines, it only oscillates between political anguish and sexual obsession.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 254

#1,513

Today, whoever does not shout is neither heard nor understood.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 254

#1,512

A woman has the intellectual temperature of the medium in which she lives: vehement revolutionary or dauntless conservative, according to the circumstances.
A reactionary she can never be.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 254

#1,511

Not intelligence but vanity reproaches “intellectual isolation.”

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 254

#1,510

The Church, since the clergy became plebeian, curses all the conquered and applauds all the conquerors.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 253

#1,509

Rhetoric is the only flower in the garden of democracy.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 253

#1,508

Democrats can be divided into two classes:
those who perish
because they do not succeed in suppressing with speeches the passions they unleashed with their harangues;
those who survive
because they alternate with the rhetoric that whips up the people's anger the grapeshot that pacifies it.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 253

#1,507

Moderate democrats promulgate the laws with which radical democrats exterminate them.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 253

#1,506

Freedom of the press is a nascent democracy’s first demand and a mature democracy’s first victim.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 253

#1,505

Journalists are the plebs’ courtiers.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 253

#1,504

The shamelessness with which the revolutionary kills is more frightening than his killings.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 253

#1,503

Democracy has terror for its means and totalitarianism for its end.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 252

#1,502

The bourgeois does not applaud the man he admires, but the man he fears.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 252

#1,501

Absolute monarchies disposed with less fickleness of the fortunes of one individual than popular absolutisms dispose of the destiny of entire social classes.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 252

#1,500

The number of votes by which a ruler is elected is not a measure of his legitimacy but his mediocrity.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 252

#1,499

Democrats describe a past that never existed and predict a future that is never realized.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 252

#1,498

Rather than an ideological strategy, the Left is a lexicographical tactic.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 252

#1,497

Souls become vitiated when bodies make themselves too comfortable.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 252

#1,496

Just as dangerous as believing the desirable to be possible is believing the possible to be desirable.
Sentimental utopias and automatisms of technology.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 252

#1,495

After the intelligent opinions have been excluded from the opinions of an age, what is left over is “public opinion.”

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 251

#1,494

I am the asylum of all the ideas displaced by modern ignominy.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 251

Bastille Day

The war in the Vendée is the only political conflict that arouses my complete sympathy without troubling my reason.

Notas, p. 465

#1,493

Sexual promiscuity is the tip society pays in order to appease its slaves.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 251

#1,492

What the mob calls history is a florilegium of erroneous interpretations compiled by the passion of the day.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 251

#1,491

Parliaments elected by means of universal suffrage first lose their moral prestige and then their political importance.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 251

#1,490

Only by establishing hierarchies can we limit the imperialism of the idea and the absolutism of power.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 251

#1,489

An event arouses passion less when its protagonists are interesting than when its observers are intelligent.

Escolios a un Texto Implícito: Selección, p. 251