Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“Wise politics is the art of invigorating society and weakening the State.”

“The individual seeks out the heat of the crowd, in this century, to protect himself against the cold emanating from the corpse of the world.”

“I distrust every idea that doesn’t seem obsolete and grotesque to my contemporaries.”

“Al repudiar los ritos, el hombre se reduce a animal que copula y come.”

“Al divorciarse religión y estética no se sabe cuál se corrompe más pronto.”

“Revolution is progressive and seeks the strengthening of the state; rebellion is reactionary and seeks its disappearance.The revolutionary is a potential government official; the rebel is a reactionary in action.”

“Now, even though it be neither necessity nor caprice, history, for the authentic reactionary, is not, for all that, an interior dialectic of the immanent will, but rather a temporal adventure between man and that which transcends him. His labors are traces, on the disturbed sand, of the body of a beast and the aura of an angel. History is a tatter, torn from man’s freedom, waving in the breath of destiny. Man cannot be silent because his liberty is not merely a sanctuary where he escapes from deadening routine and takes refuge in order to become his own master. But in the free act the radical does not attain possession of his essence. Liberty is not an abstract possibility of choosing among known goods, but rather the concrete condition in which we are granted the possession of new goods. Freedom is not a momentary judgement between conflicting instincts, but rather the summit from which man contemplates the ascent of new stars among the luminous dust of the starry sky. Liberty places man among prohibitions that are not physical and imperatives that are not vital. The free moment dispels the unreal brightness of the day, in order that the motion of the universe which slides its fleeting lights over the shuddering of our flesh might rise up on the horizon of our soul.If the progressive casts himself into the future, and the conservative into the past, the authentic reactionary does not measure his anxiety with the history of yesterday or with the history of tomorrow. He does not extol what the new dawn might bring, nor is he terrified by the last shadows of the night. His spirit rises up to a space where the essential accosts him with its immortal presence. One escapes the slavery of history by pursuing in the wildness of the world the traces of divine footsteps. Man and his deeds are a vital but servile and mortal flesh that breathes gusts from beyond the mountains. To be reactionary is to champion causes that do not turn up on the notice board of history, causes where losing does not matter. It is to know that we only discover what we think we invent; to admit that our imagination does not create, but only lays bare smooth surfaces. It is not to espouse settled cases, nor to plead for determined conclusions, but rather to submit our will to the necessity that does not constrain, to surrender our freedom to the exigency that does not compel; it is to find sleeping certainties that guide us to the edge of ancient pools. The reactionary is not a nostalgic dreamer of a canceled past, but rather a seeker of sacred shades upon eternal hills.”

“Poetry rescues things by reconciling matter and spirit in the metaphor.”

“In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesn't know.”

“Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal.”

“Faith is not knowledge of an object but communion with it.”

“Many love humanity only in order to forget God with a clear conscience.”

“Conformism and non-conformism are symmetrical expressions of a lack of originality.”

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

“Unnütz, jemandem einen Gedanken erklären zu wollen, dem eine Anspielung nicht genügt.”