Quotes About Change

The anarchy that threatens a degrading society is not its punishment, but its remedy.

Civilizations are the summer noise of insects between two winters.

Progress ages badly. Each generation brings a new model of progressivism which discards with contempt the previous model. Nothing is more grotesque than yesterday's progressive.

The modern world seems invincible. Like the extinct dinosaurs.

Revolutions are carried out in order to change the ownership of property and the names of streets. The revolutionary who seeks to change "man's condition" ends up being shot for being a counter-revolutionary.

Useless, like a revolution.

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?

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

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.

What is called progress are preparations for a catastrophe.

The pure reactionary is not a dreamer of abolished pasts, but a hunter of sacred shades on the eternal hills... The reactionary does not aspire to turn back, but rather to change direction. The past that he admires is not a goal but an exemplification of his dreams.

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

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

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.

Adapting to the modern world demands the hardening of one's sensibility and the debasing of one's character.

To refute the new morality, all one needs to do is examine the faces of its aged devotees.

Cambiano meno gli uomini le idee che le idee i loro travestimenti. Nel corso dei secoli dialogano le stesse voci.

Alles was ein Tradition unterbricht zwingt zu neuem Anfang. Und jeder Anfang ist blutig.

Humanity is not cured of its diseases except by means of catastrophes that decimate it. Man has never known how to renounce at the right time.

The most convinced reactionary is the repentant revolutionary, that is to say: the man who has known the reality of the problems and has discovered the falseness of the solutions.

Alle Welt ist heute links. Welche Erleichterung!

The modern world resulted from the confluence of three independent causal series: the demographic expansion, democratic propaganda, the industrial revolution.

The horror of progress can only be measured by someone who has known a landscape before and after progress has transformed it.