Quotes About Dreyfus

In January 1898 Zola took an important part in the defense of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jew unjustly accused of selling military secrets to Germany.

The preconceived opinion which they brought to the Bench was evidently this: "Dreyfus has been condemned for the crime of treason by a Court-Martial; he is therefore guilty, and we, the Court-Martial, cannot declare him innocent; for we know that to proclaim the guilt of Esterhazy would be to proclaim the innocence of Dreyfus.

The nation took precedence over any universal value, proclaimed the anti-Dreyfusard Charles Maurras, whose Action Française movement is sometimes considered the first authentic fascism.72 When a document used to incriminate Dreyfus turned out to have been faked, Maurras was undaunted. It was, he said, a "patriotic forgery," a faux patriotique.

Craftsmanship, Dreyfus and Kelly argue in their book's conclusion, provides a key to reopening a sense of sacredness in a responsible manner.

The Enlightenment's metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life," Dreyfus and Kelly worry; "it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one.

Zola nunca se encontró con Dreyfus.

My views about the safety of Jews in the world have not been changed by the work on the Dreyfus affair or, for that matter, by the work I did on Franz Kafka for the book on him I published a year before the Dreyfus book appeared.

Strauss's later judgment on the Kantian-Cohenian idea of ethical socialism was dispositive: Cohen's thought belongs to the world preceding World War I. Accordingly, he had a greater faith in the power of modern Western culture to mold the fate of mankind than seems warranted now. The worst things he had experienced were the Dreyfus scandal and the pogroms instigated by Czarist Russia; he did not experience Communist Russia and Hitler's Germany.