Quotes from Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Vulgarity is not a product of the people but a subproduct of bourgeois prosperity.

Damit das Individuum interessant sei, muß die Ethik sein Leben komplizieren.

Vulgarity consists in striving to be what we are not.

The modern world will not be punished. It is the punishment.

La técnica no cumple los viejos sueños del hombre, sino los remeda con sorna.

Der moderne Mensch versucht mit der Unzucht, der Gewalt und der Niederträchtigkeit die Unschuld eines höllischen Paradieses zu schaffen.

A little patience in dealing with a fool helps us avoid sacrificing our good manners to our convictions.

The ignoramus believes that the expression "aristocratic manners" signified insolent behavior; whoever investigates discovers that the expression signified courtesy, refinement, dignity.

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

The soul should open itself up to foreign invasion, refuse to defend itself, favor the enemy, so that our authentic being appears and arises, not like a fragile structure protected by our timidity, but like our rock, our incorruptible granite.

The horror of progress can only be measured by someone who has known a landscape before and after progress has transformed it.

Progress is the offspring of knowledge of nature. Faith in progress is the offspring of ignorance of history.

We disapprove of capitalism not because it promotes inequality, but because it favors the rise of inferior human types.

Modern man does not live in space and time, but in geometry and chronometry.

Between the dictatorship of technology and the technology of dictatorship, man no longer finds a crack through which he can slip away.

Die Jahre der Jugend genügen in einer zivilisierten Gesellschaft, um die Sensibilität, die Intelligenz, die Seele zu erziehen. Heute ist dies durch den Einsatz eines ganzen Lebens kaum zu erreichen

The progressive's cardinal syllogism is simply beautiful: the best always triumphs, because what triumphs is called the best.

To hope that the growing vulnerability of a world increasingly integrated by technology will not demand a total despotism is mere foolishness.

There is nothing more common than to transform a duty that inconveniences us into an "ethical dilemma".

To educate man is to impede the "free expression of his personality.

Let us respect the two poles of man: concrete individual, human spirit. But not the middle zone of an animal with opinions.

Human problems are neither exactly definable, nor remotely solvable. He who expects Christianity to solve them has ceased to be a Christian.

La norma ética nos prohíbe ver a los hombres como medios y al Hombre como fin.

Our last hope lies in the injustice of God.