Quotes from Emil Cioran

We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

Under each formula lies a corpse.

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

Glory - once achieved, what is it worth?

A people represents not so much an aggregate of ideas and theories as of obsessions.

Consciousness is much more than the thorn, it is the dagger in the flesh.

We inhabit a language rather than a country.

To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.

Woes and wonders of Power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.

The more we try to wrest ourselves from our ego, the deeper we sink into it.

A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.

No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.

So long as man is protected by madness, he functions, and flourishes.

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

Injustice constitutes the essence of social life.

Tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself.

The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.

Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.

Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.

One hardly saves a world without ruling it.

A marvel that has nothing to offer, democracy is at once a nation's paradise and its tomb.

Nothing is so wearing as the possession or abuse of liberty.

For you who no longer posses it, freedom is everything, for us who do, it is merely an illusion.

Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.