Quotes from Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Faith is not knowledge of an object but communion with it.

Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God, another who believes he is a god.

The philosopher is not the spokesman of his age, but an angel imprisoned in time.

Revolution is progressive and seeks the strengthening of the state; rebellion is reactionary and seeks its disappearance. The revolutionary is a potential government official; the rebel is a reactionary in action.

An irreligious society cannot endure the truth of the human condition. It prefers a lie, no matter how idiotic it may be.

Being a reactionary is not about believing in certain solutions, but about having an acute sense of the complexity of the problems.

The freer man believes he is, the easier it is to indoctrinate him.

The individual seeks out the heat of the crowd, in this century, to protect himself against the cold emanating from the corpse of the world.

In society just as in the soul, when hierarchies abdicate the appetites rule.

There is an illiteracy of the soul which no diploma cures.

Civilizations are the summer noise of insects between two winters.

Wise politics is the art of invigorating society and weakening the State.

To live with lucidity a simple, quiet, discreet life among intelligent books, loving a few beings.

The cultured man has the obligation to be intolerant.

To demand that the intelligence abstain from judging mutilates its faculty of understanding. It is in the value judgment that understanding culminates.

When he is stripped of the Christian tunic and the classical toga, there is nothing left of the European but a pale-skinned barbarian.

Progress ages badly. Each generation brings a new model of progressivism which discards with contempt the previous model. Nothing is more grotesque than yesterday's progressive.

Rather than humanizing technology, modern man prefers to technify man.

Ideas tyrannize the man who has but few.

Contemporary literature, in each and every epoch, is the worst enemy of culture. A reader's limited time is wasted in reading a thousand books that blunt his critical sense and damage his literary sensibility. (I, 258)

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

Truths are not relative. What is relative are opinions about truth.

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

In order not to think of the world which science describes, man gets drunk on technology.