Quotes from Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Once he settles down in the country he admires, the foreigner bastardizes exactly that which he admires.

El hombre no se comunica con otro hombre sino cuando el uno escribe en su soledad y el otro lo lee en la suya. Las conversaciones son o diversión, o estafa, o esgrima.

Modernity ingeniously finds a way not to present its theology directly, but rather through profane notions that imply it. It avoids announcing to man his divinity, but proposes goals that only a god could reach, or rather proclaims that the essence of man has rights which assume he is divine.

Die Aristokraten sind die normalen; die Demokraten die Fehlgeburten der Geschichte.

Although it grieves the angelism of the democrat: one cannot build a civilisation with miserable biological material.

Phrases are pebbles that the writer tosses into the reader's soul. The diameter of the concentric waves they displace depends on the dimensions of the pond.

The cultural standard of an intelligent people sinks as its standard of living rises.

Earth will never be a paradise, but it could perhaps be prevented from coming closer and closer to being a vulgar imitation of hell.

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.

The pure reactionary is not a dreamer of abolished pasts, but a hunter of sacred shades on the eternal hills.

In the bosom of the Church today, 'integralists' are those who do not understand that Christianity needs a new theology, and 'progressives' are those who do not understand that the new theology must be Christian.

To be useful to society" is the ambition, or excuse, of a prostitute.

Where everyone believes he has a right to rule, everyone eventually prefers that one man alone rule. The tyrant frees each individual from the tyranny of his neighbor.

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

When the tyrant is the anonymous law, modern man believes he is free.

Nietzsche is merely rude; Hegel is blasphemous.

Genuine thought only discovers its principles at the end.

Llámanse progresos los preparativos de las catástrofes.

He who longs for "perfect communication" among individuals, their reciprocal "perfect transparency," their mutual "perfect possession," as a certain high priest of the left does, longs for the perfect totalitarian society.

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.

What is "rational" consists in prolonging life, avoiding pain, satisfying the appetite for hunger and sex. Only some such definition sheds any light on the discourse of the last centuries.

Die nationalistische Xenophobie bewahrt die Unversehrtheit köstlicher Speisen für die, die weder Nationalisten noch xenophob sind.

We who want to admit nothing but what has value, will always seem naïve to those who recognize nothing but what is in force.

In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn't know.