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Politics is the art of seeking the best relationship between force and ethics.
It is puerile to imagine that political activity is at all intellectual.
Simply hearing the wishes, ambitions, and intentions of a politician is enough to understand his activity is debased.
The worst demagogues are not recruited from among the envious poor, but from the guilt-ridden rich
We do not ask for a political system that will grant man happiness, but one that will contribute to his greatness- or at least, will allow it.
A stable political regime is simply a group of families that carries on.
The intelligent modern statesman is reduced to using his skills to slow the approach of catastrophe as much as possible.
When a political event inspires sincere enthusiasm among the intelligent, this is, perhaps, the sentiment I least understand. Nowhere else do I find an reaction so disproportionate to its cause.
To sincerely despise others requires such obstinacy that the statesman, whose success necessarily depends on the possession of an enormous capacity for contempt, must be, deep down, an idiot.
Argument against some political doctrine tends to be a useless act, because it typically starts from a place of ignorance of the hidden effects of the doctrine- which are its true meaning and the actual cause of its success.
All peace is bought with villainy.
What keeps me from political activity is that it cannot be intelligent unless it is unfair.
The politician only converts believers. Political discourse is a liturgical ceremony that commemorates the significant events of a cult, or is perhaps a demonstration of magic to reinvigorate the faithful.
In war, violence, cruelty, barbarism prevail; in peace, cunning, deception, intrigue.
What both Joseph de Maistre and Marx call “social structures” are what liberal thought imagined were pure acts of the human will. The echo of those 150 years of political eloquence is, in the twentieth century, a laugh amidst ruins.
In politics, only illogical doctrines are healthy and fruitful.
No political species is so seductive to me as those liberal aristocrats, whose keen sense of freedom does not come from some murky democratic yearning, but from a steadfast awareness of individual dignities and a clear understanding of the duties of a ruling class.
With every statesman who is wrong, with every weak politician overwhelmed by events, I feel an uncomfortable brotherhood.
A healthy country is one that idiots can easily rule. A country in need of an intelligent ruler is in full decline.
Pessimists in politics are always correct in the long run, but that is no reason to think they possess wisdom which, deep down, they lack. Just as he who wisely proclaims of a newborn that someday he will die, when the pessimist predicts the death of any political form, it is clear that by merely waiting this forecast will be fulfilled. Wisdom as superfluous as it is true.
The War in the Vendée is the only political conflict that captures my complete sympathy without disturbing my reason. I have never known how to be a supporter but of the lost causes.
Most of the political ideas of an age depend on the state of military technology.
The politician attends to nothing with seriousness except the trivial.
The leftist miraculously avoids stepping on the calluses of the authentically powerful. The leftist only vilifies the simulacra of power.
The public is always ready to legitimize any despotism. Not only because freedom tends to be a useless luxury, but because the confidence and hardness that every tyranny must feign and the vigor with which is governs satisfies the popular hunger for security. Despotism is the political form the masses naturally tend toward.
Honesty in politics is not stupidity but in the eye of the cheat.
More than any other human activity, political action seems empty of all real substance. Even the most vain intellectual pursuit has more blood in its veins. And some failures leave, along with their bitterness, a certain secret pride.
But political activity is mediocre in what it longs for and mediocre in what it achieves.
Leftism is the banner under which the bourgeois mentality of the 19th century maintains its hegemony into the 20th.
Those with political experience rely on nothing so much as the classic maxim: do not do today what you can leave for tomorrow.
There are some exceptions to the current mediocrity of political life. Certain men have given themselves to the political task with an absolute consecration. From that unfettered gift of themselves, from that rejection of everything that could distract them from their end, an almost religious purity is born. The communist militant, before his victory, deserves the greatest respect.
Afterward, he is nothing more than an overworked bourgeoisie.
Retz, Saint-Simon, Chateaubriand, Tocqueville: highest peaks on a mountain range.
Political misadventures repeat themselves, because they are expressions of human nature.
Successes do not repeat themselves, because they are a gift of history.
Within the incoherence of a political constitution lies the only real guarantee of liberty.
All life “colonizes.” Everything that lives aspires to continue infinitely. Nothing spontaneously limits itself. No harmony is the result of mutual respect or reciprocal restraint; harmony stems from hostile intervention and the temporary stabilizing of forces.
Every political solution is lame, but some limp with grace.
In the current political landscape, no party is closer than others to the truth. Some are simply further away.
What they have called “the right” in this century has been nothing more than cynicism in the face of the hypocrisy of the left.
Intransigence in politics tends to be an affectation compensating for personal weakness.
To be intelligent in politics, just find a dumber opponent.
Most political doctrines suffer the redhibitory defect of having developed as protests in a contentious climate. These doctrines are usually a protest of wounded interest or a cry of violated conviction, and, like a reflex that cannot control itself, they have always extended beyond their purposes.
In our time, so long as the ruler proclaims himself a leftist, everything he does is permissible and all is forgiven.
He who denounces the intellectual limitations of the politician forgets that he owes them his successes.
Political vocabulary has a magical rather than rational significance. The political vocabulary is used as a spell to evoke a certain reaction, to produce a certain mood; that is why the repetition of the same ideas and the same phrases, which tire the indifferent listener, is not tedious or monotonous for those who find there a trigger of a particular excitement.
The social policy that ignores the past may end up spectacularly inscribed across the sky of history, but it is hopelessly barbaric.
The state of tension between social classes, a constant structural phenomenon, metamorphosizes into class struggle when a political class is used as a tool of political demagoguery.
Common good, general will, historical necessity, are the names with which the flatterer christens the whims of force.
Political conservatism has a double root: there are two different species of conservative. Some are conservative because of laziness of spirit, satisfaction with himself and his situation, and this prevents him from yearning for any change. The second class belongs to true skeptics or those who are restrained by a need for contemplation and consideration of new ideas. The latter, above all, need an external peace, and are unable to bear uncertainty, disorder, agitation, and chaos in the world or in their own thoughts.
The revolutionary, on the contrary, is dissatisfied easily- or rather, forms opinions easily, has a superficial knowledge of complex structures, and does not know how to question the things he believes.
Perhaps we can say that, among the mediocre, those who are less so will be revolutionaries; and among the great spirits, whose who are more so will be conservative.
A fight between democratic sects temporarily distracts them from the dismantling of society.
Eventually the names of famous leftists end up as insulting adjectives in leftist mouths.
Politics is not the art of imposing the best solutions, but hindering the worst.
The vice afflicting the right is cynicism; the one afflicting the left is deceit.
Liberal ideas are likable.
Their consequences ruinous.
The central subject of politics, yesterday: the right to power.
The central subject of politics, today: the techniques of seizing power.
A passion for the issues, in leftist regimes, is a synthetic product manufactured by the authorities.
A work of politics is unrepeatable, like a work of art, and equally capable of the same eternity.
Man matures when he ceases to believe that politics solves his problems.
The bourgeois does not applaud the man he admires, but the one he fears.
In politics we should be wary of even intelligent optimism and trust in the fears of the fool.
Two figures inspire a particular pity today:
the bourgeois politician whom history patiently silences,
and the Marxist philosopher whom history patiently refutes.
The worst rhetoric is cultivated in democratic nations, where formalism must always pretend to be spontaneous and sincere. Monarchical rhetoric is a recognized and admitted formalism, like etiquette.
Liberal parties never understand that the opposite of despotism is not chaos and stupidity, but authority.
Today’s political parties have converged even in their rhetoric.
To ensure the inevitability of catastrophe, there is nothing more effective than to call an assembly to propose reforms to avert it.
From those turned conservative merely as a result of experience, the ears of the liberal jackass are likely to poke out.
A politician may not be able to conceive of every stupidity, but he is always capable of saying it.
“Political ideas” influence politics least.
Note: Dávila was a Colombian political philosopher and in the Latin church. His aphorisms are presented here for the purposes of enjoyment, study, and historical record, but do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this writer. For more information on Dávila, see this introductory post. For information on how to live your life, go to church and read the Church Fathers/Saints.
Featured image: Antique end-papers from the Bergen Public Library. source
