Quotes from Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Useless, like a revolution.

Where Christianity disappears, greed, envy, and lust invent a thousand ideologies to justify themselves.

The near future will probably bring extraordinary catastrophes, but what threatens the world most certainly is not the violence of ravenous crowds, but the weariness of boring masses.

The so highly acclaimed "dominion of man over nature" turned out to be merely an enormous capability to kill.

Wisdom consists in being moderate not out of horror of excess, but out of love for the limit.

Sensuality is a cultural legacy of the ancient world. Societies where the Greco-Roman legacy is being wiped out, or where it does not exist, only know sentimentalism and sexuality.

The intelligent leftist admits that his generation will not construct the perfect society, but trusts in a future generation. His intelligence discovers his personal impotence, but his leftism prevents him from discovering man's impotence.

Two hundred years ago it was permissible to trust in the future without being totally stupid. But today, who can believe in the current prophecies, since we are yesterday's splendid future?

Revolutionary intellectuals have the historic mission of inventing the vocabulary and the themes for the next tyranny.

Reading Nietzsche as a response is not understanding him. Nietzsche is an immense interrogation.

Every individual with "ideals" is a potential murderer.

Reading is an unsurpassable drug, because more than just the mediocrity of our lives, it allows us to escape the mediocrity of our souls.

Man forges his own history, imposing on nature the errors of his free will. If hatred and greed drag man down among bloody mazes, the struggle is joined between perverted freedoms and just freedoms.

The French Revolution has been the highest wave of the Gnostic tide.

An atheist is respectable as long as he does not teach that the dignity of man is the basis of ethics and that love for humanity is the true religion.

It is no longer enough for the citizen to submit—the modern state demands accomplices.

A simple fit of impatience often soon bridges the distance between utopia and murder.

Anguish over the decline of civilization is the affliction of a reactionary. The democrat cannot lament the disappearance of something of which he is ignorant.

One of the worst intellectual catastrophes is found in the appropriation of scientific concepts and vocabulary by mediocre intelligences.

The facility with which industrial capitalism constructs and destroys—obeying clear precepts of profitability—transforms the average man into an intellectual, moral, and physical nomad. Whatever is permanent today is an obstacle.

The gesture, rather than the word, is the true transmitter of traditions.

A partisan of equality who is not envious can only be so because he is stupid.

The enemies of myth are not the friends of reality but of triviality.

Everything that makes man feel that mystery envelops him makes him more intelligent.