Quotes from Nicolás Gómez Dávila

A reactionary is anyone who is not prepared to buy his victory at any price.

There is something definitively vile about the man who only admits equals, who does not tirelessly seek out his betters.

That the French Revolution was essentially a religious phenomenon was only seen with clarity by Joseph de Maistre and Jules Michelet.

In history it is wise to hope for miracles and absurd to trust in plans. Intelligent optimism is never faith in progress, but hope in a miracle.

Population growth disquiets the demographer only when he fears that it will impede economic progress or make it harder to feed the masses. But that man needs solitude, that human proliferation produces cruel societies, that distance is required between men so that the spirit might breathe, does not interest him. The quality of man does not matter to him.

Either we learn from Greek tragedy how to read human history, or we never learn how to read it.

Rulers who represent only a minority have to invent civilization in order not to perish. The delegates of a majority, on the other hand, can be vulgar, rude, cruel, with impunity. The greater the majority that supports him, the less cautious the ruler is, the less tolerant, the less respectful of human diversity. When rulers deem themselves governors of all humanity, terror is near.

Sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, are experts in generalities. When confrontedy by the bull's horns of a concrete case, they all look like Anglo-Saxon bullfighters.

The pessimists prophesy a future of rubble, but the optimistic prophets are even more horrifying when they proclaim the future city where baseness and boredom dwell, in intact beehives.

Ethical rules vary; honour does not change. A man is noble if he prefers to fail rather than to debase the tools of his triumph.

To find oneself at the mercy of the people's whims, thanks to universal suffrage, is what liberalism calls the guarantee of freedom.

We reactionaries provide idiots the pleasure of feeling like daring avant-garde thinkers.

The reactionary is that fool who possesses the vanity to judge history, and the immorality to come to terms with it.

Authentic atheism is a blank page; Gnostic atheism hides a text written in invisible ink. The Ãœbermensch is the recourse of a nonconformist atheism. Nietzsche invents a human consolation for the death of God; Gnostic atheism, on the other hand, proclaims the divinity of man.

Humanity will one day solemnly recall the events that initiated the dismantlement of the industrial society.

Wenn ein Reaktionär von "unvermeidlicher Restauration" spricht, dürfen wir nicht vergessen, dass der Reaktionär in Jahrtausenden rechnet.

The liberation promised by every invention ends with the growing submission of the man who adopts it to the man who manufactures it.

Die Christen Nietzsches sind nicht die von gestern, sondern die von heute. Kein exakter Historiker, aber vielleicht ein Prophet.

The fervor of the homage which the democrat renders to humanity is comparable only to the coldness with which he disrespects the individual. The reactionary disdains man, without meeting an individual he scorns. Treating an inferior with respect and affection is the classic syndrome of the reactionary psychosis.

The most repulsive and grotesque spectacle is that of the superiority of a living professor over a dead genius.

Frustration is the distinctive psychological characteristic of democratic society. Where all may legitimately aspire to the summit, the entire pyramid is an accumulation of frustrated individuals.

Even for Buddhist compassion, the individual is only a shadow that vanishes. The dignity of the individual is a Christian cast made out of Greek clay.

An American historian cannot write history without lamenting that providence did not consult him beforehand.

Without the spread of oriental cults and without the Germanic invasions, Hellenistic civilization would have initiated, with Rome as its starting-point, the Americanization of the world.