Quotes from Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Leveling is the barbarian's substitute for order.

Las verdades no están en la circunferencia de un círculo cuyo centro es el hombre. Las verdades se levantan en parajes fragosos que el hombre recorre siguiendo los meandros de una senda sinuosa que las revela, las oculta, finalmente las ostenta o las esconde.

Linke und Rechte sind durch die verschiedenen Deutungen charakterisiert, die sie dem zweideutigen Motto geben, das Goya für ein Capricho wählt: "El sueño de la razón produce monstruos." Die Linke übersetzt: schlafen. Die Rechte: träumen.

In unremarkable texts we soon trip on phrases that penetrate into us, as if a sword has thrust up to its hilt inside us.

Good manners, in the end, are nothing but the way in which respect is expressed. Since respect, in its turn, is a feeling inspired by the presence of an admitted superior, wherever hierarchies are absent—real or fictitious, but revered—good manners die out. Rudeness is a democratic product.

Un diploma de dentista es respetable, pero uno de filósofo es grotesco.

Modern man no longer dares to preach that the individual is born as a blank slate. Too many mishaps have taught him that we are the oppressed heirs of our family, our race, our blood. Blood is not an innocent liquid, but the viscous paste of history.

None of us finds it difficult to love the neighbor who seems inferior to us. But to love someone we know is superior is another thing.

Modern man fears technology's destructive capacity, when it is its constructive capacity that threatens him.

Legal freedom of expression has grown alongside the sociological enslavement of thought.

Reformar la sociedad por medio de leyes es el sueño del ciudadano incauto y el preámbulo discreto de toda tiranía. La ley es forma jurídica de la costumbre o atropello a la libertad.

The increasing disintegration of the person can be measured by comparing the expression "amorous adventure," which was in style in the 18th century, with the expression "sexual experience," which is used in the 20th century.

Natural disasters devastate a region less effectively than the alliance of greed and technology.

The plethora of laws is a sign that nobody knows anymore how to command intelligently. Or that nobody knows anymore how to obey freely. When the tyrant is the anonymous law, modern man believes he is free.

Today's reactionary has a satisfaction which yesterday's did not: to see modern programs end not only in disaster but also in ridicule.

Universal suffrage in the end does not recognize any of the individual's rights except the "right" to be alternately oppressor or oppressed.

In order to escape from this prison, one must learn not to come to an arrangement with its indisputable comforts.

It is fine to demand that the imbecile respect arts, letters, philosophy, the sciences, but let him respect them in silence.

Just as dangerous as believing the desirable to be possible is believing the possible to be desirable. Sentimental utopias and automatisms of technology.

Opinions, customs, institutions, cities—everything has become vulgar, since we gave up repairing the old in order to buy every day some gaudy novelty.

The particular creature we love is never God's rival. What ends in apostasy is the worship of man, the cult of humanity.

The liberal is always mistaken because he does not distinguish between the consequences he attributes to his intentions and the consequences his intentions effectively include.

By means of the notion of "cultural evolution," the democratic anthropologist tries to avoid questions of biology.

The contemporary anthropologist, under democrats' severe gaze, skips quickly over ethnic differences like over hot coals.