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Those who prophesy more than indefinite cycles of decline and ascent are hiding some dubious product they want to sell for cash.
Revolutionary violence builds trivial triumphs over terrible corpses.
The revolutionary is, basically, a man who does not suspect that humanity can commit a crime against itself.
While political violence leaves corpses in its wake, it leaves in greater number rotting souls.
Those who manufacture societies are the most miserable of men. Their tenacious effort culminates in establishing what they loathe; the most ingenious and contented among them only manage to baptize old facts with new names, or hide under a blanket of plans and theories the same precarious nakedness.
Bourgeois reformers prepare the legal precedents for their future despoilers.
Neither a revolutionary’s eloquence, nor love letters, can be read by third parties without laughing.
The might of communism and of “revolutionary” ideas in general stems from their drawing near to the deepest strata of the soul, where terror, anguish, hope, and enthusiasm, all muddle together and join in the vast gloom- religious territory.
In spite of his typical rude and tough attitude, the sincere reformer has a delicate sensibility. Emotional, irritable, unable to tolerate what hurts his fragile conscience, the reformer passionately loves man, and in that love he finds the reasons for his protest and rebellion.
But if his love for man is the motivation for his reform, that same love brings about the failure of what it provokes. For the reformer aims to build a society consisting only of those feelings and passions he deems worthy. The complex structure he tries to build requires that men renounce greed, ambition, selfishness; that they seek the collective good over private interests; that perverse intentions, dark appetites, and irrational passions fade away like the grey mists of dawn.
In other words, the society of the reformer presumes and requires what could only perhaps exist after countless efforts and labors, and could only possibly be the result of a patient, wise, and very slow social organization.
None of the high peaks in history have been planned. The reformer can only be credited with errors.
The political platforms of the left are discreetly transformed into gallows.
Revolution is a permanent historical possibility.
Revolution does not have causes, but occasions it takes advantage of.
The progressive clergyman, in revolutionary periods, ends up dead- but not as a martyr.
Every revolution makes us nostalgic for the previous one.
The terrorist is the liberal’s grandson.
Stupidity is the fuel of revolutions.
Every revolution in the name of democracy consolidates the State. The revolutionary does not rise up against the omnipotent State, but against whomever controls it at the moment.
When he realizes the vanity of the democratic endeavor, man takes refuge in the hideous lair of wounded gods. Cruelty becomes his solace. Man forgets his impotence, and imitates divine omnipotence, before the useless pain of another man whom he tortures.
Bureaucracies do not succeed revolutions by coincidence.
Revolutions are the bloody births of bureaucracies.
Democratic massacres belong to the logic of the democratic system.
Ancient massacres to the illogicality of man.
True revolutions do not begin with their public outbreak, but rather end with it.
Revolutions swing back and forth between puritanism and debauchery, without touching civilized ground.
The authentic revolutionary rebels in order to abolish the society he hates; today’s revolutionary rises up to inherit the one he covets.
Unlimited naivete is required in order to believe that any social condition can be improved in any way other than slowly, gradually, and involuntarily.
Latin American revolutions have never sought anything more than to hand power over to some Directoire.
To destroy the illusions that caused it: this is the function of revolution.
Tyrannies have no servants more faithful than revolutionaries who were not protected against their inborn servility by witnessing a firing squad at a young age.
They speak emphatically of “transforming the world,” when the most to which they can aspire are certain secondary remodelings of society.
Left-wing ideas cause revolutions;
revolutions cause right-wing ideas.
Democratic revolutions begin their executions as they announce the prompt abolition of the death penalty.
Prophets and reformers always forget that the society they dream of will be populated by the men who live with them now, and so to a certain extent, tomorrow cannot essentially differ from the social reality of today.
Those who initiate revolutionary movements and achieve the first triumphs are generally unable to remain in power. The enthusiasm to rebel is not what it takes to build a government.
From the utopias of one era come the massacres of the next.
The revolutionary attitude of modern youth is unequivocal proof of their aptitude for a career in administration. Revolutions are perfect incubators of bureaucrats.
A proletarian revolution would not be the seizure of power by another social class, but by another political group.
Today’s revolutionaries are nothing but impatient heirs. Revolutionaries might be taken seriously if the hated “consumption” they complain of didn’t only apply to someone else’s consumption.
The most severe attack against man is the mutilation of the oak in which formed the sap of a thousand bitter springs. To break the juridical continuity of a people is to pull history back to a new bloody initiation; it is to begin again the same bitter task.
Stupidity is the mother of revolutionary atrocities.
Savagery is only the godmother.
The reformer soon condemns to death, in his mind anyway, three quarters of humanity.
When a revolution breaks out, the appetites are placed at the service of ideals;
when the revolution triumphs, ideals are placed at the service of the appetites.
Between the causes of a revolution, and its realization, ideologies insert themselves which end up determining the course and even the nature of events. “Ideas” do not “cause” revolutions, but channel them.
After every revolution, the revolutionary teaches that the true revolution will be tomorrow’s revolution.
The revolutionary explains that a miserable traitor has betrayed yesterday’s revolution.
A “revolutionary” today means an individual for whom modern vulgarity is not triumphing quickly enough.
Every society that expands with envy eventually explodes.
An historical period is the period of time during which a certain definition of the legitimate prevails.
Revolution is the transition from one definition to another.
Repentant, like a victorious revolutionary.
Revolutionaries do not destroy anything, in the end, except what made the societies against which they rebel tolerable.
Revolutions are not the locomotives but the derailments of history.
I do not resign myself to man’s idiotic collaboration with death by joining in with the killing, destroying, reforming, abolishing.
Professing revolutionary opinions: the only career, in contemporary society, that assures a respectable, lucrative, and peaceful social position.
When economic and social revolutions are not simply ideological pretexts for religious crises, after a few years of disorder everything continues as before.
What is most likely to come is not a revolutionary terror, but a counter-revolutionary terror implemented by disgusted revolutionaries.
We fail to escape militant politics unless when we comprehend that no ideal lasts in time, and that it is not worth it, then, to fight for such fleeting victories.
A long revolutionary period with its many adventures and changing circumstances successively suppresses the various revolutionary attitudes, until only the men capable of withstanding such changing circumstances persist- that is, those for whom not an ideal but rather a cunning predominates. The will to be and do anything in order to rule everything.
There is no spectacle in history more noble, nor more beautiful, than that of the popular insurrection not motivated by envy or greed.
To be a “revolutionary” today means to be an individual for whom modern vulgarity is not triumphing quickly enough.
The conceptual origins of the French Revolution must be sought in those intellectual fringes of the 18th century, where the occult conspired with envy, and credulity with petulance. A good monograph on Mercier, Restif, Bonneville, Fauchet, Pontard, etc, etc would clarify the matter moreso than so much dissertation on illustrious authors.
The mistake of most reformers is to believe that humanity will obey the principles they themselves do not.
The revolutionary activity of the young man is the rite of passage between adolescence and bourgeoisie.
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 as a counter-revolutionary.
Transforming the world: the occupation of a convict resigned to his punishment.
The intelligent man does not wait for the killings to begin in order to detest revolution.
A bureaucratic destiny awaits revolutionaries, like the sea awaits rivers.
Nothing softens up the bourgeois more than a revolutionary from a foreign country.
Among statesmen, the reformer is distinguished by the extremism of his actions and the fanatical integrity of his decisions. Thus, his trust in the rectitude of his purposes leads to the disinterest of his conscience, and allows him extremes that an egoist would reject in terror.
He who inquires into the causes of a revolution must never infer them from its effects. Between the causes of a revolution and its effects are the whirlwinds of chance.
Reactionaries are recruited from among the front-row spectators of a revolution.
Revolutions bequeath to literature only the laments of their victims and the invective of their enemies.
The bourgeois mentality of the left will, one after another, reconstruct all bourgeois societies that the left successively destroys.
Even when it is right, a revolution solves nothing.
Revolutionary intellectuals have the historic mission of inventing the vocabulary and themes of the next tyranny.
In every utopian, a police sergeant sleeps.
The memory of a civilization resides in the continuity of its institutions.
The revolution that interrupts civilization’s memory, by destroying those institutions, does not relieve the society of a paralyzing chitinous shell, but merely forces it to start over.
The leftist does not condemn violence until he hears it pounding on his door.
Useless, like a revolution.
The only societies more odious than those which infuriate the rebellious youth are those he naively helps to build.
Those who seek to abolish man’s alienation by changing the juridical structure of the economy remind one of the man who solved the problem of his marital misfortune by selling the sofa on which the adultery took place.
Every revolution exacerbates the evils against which it breaks out.
Revolutionary agitation is endemic in the cities, while merely epidemic in the country.
The shamelessness with which the revolutionary kills is more frightening than his killings.
Reforms are the entrance ramps to revolutions.
Social improvements do not come from great shocks, but from light nudges.
The struggle against injustice that does not culminate in sanctity culminates in bloody upheavals.
Revolutions do not solve any problems other than the economic problems of their leaders.
Power does not necessarily corrupt without fail- except when the revolutionary assumes it.
Absolute revolution is the favorite topic of those who do not even dare to protest when they are trodden on.
When the masses awaken, first they shout, then they get drunk, pillage, and murder, later they go back to sleep.
One can only hope for a reform of society to come from contradictions between human absurdities.
The revolutionary does not discover the “authentic spirit of the revolution” except before the revolutionary tribunal that condemns him.
The lie is the muse of the revolution: it inspires their programs, their proclamations, their grand spectacles.
But it forgets to gag their witnesses.
Revolution seems to be less a tactic for executing a plan than a drug for fleeing the boredom of modernity during one’s spare time.
Militant millenarian events are outbursts of human impatience, not a glimpse of divine omnipotence.
That some of the very traits the reformer objects to may be necessary to produce his ideal society in the first place, that the means must resemble the ends, this is the insoluble contradiction that makes the revolutionary attitude worthless.
For the actual results of a prior revolution, let us consult the revolutionaries who are preparing the next one.
It is not so much the plebeian merriment revolutions unleash that frightens the reactionary, as the zealously bourgeois order they engender.
Every grand revolutionary movement, whatever its programs and doctrines, reveals to historians, sooner or later, the methodically plagiarized metaphorical vocabulary of religious history.
The revolutionary attitude forces its way past other attitudes. Because ignorance, stupidity, and obnoxiousness are not obstacles to assuming it.
Great democratic upheavals do incurable harm to the soul of a people.
Revolutions begin with shouts in the street and end with the roll of drums.
In Rousseau’s prose, one hears the first chords of the counterrevolutionary symphony.
Those who defend revolutions cite speeches;
those who accuse them cite facts.
True social transformation is not the result of frustration and envy, but the consequence of epidemics of disgust and boredom.
Fools used to attack the Church; now they reform her.
Victorious revolutions result from an excess of greed. Only defeated revolutions tend to be the insurrections of the oppressed.
History does not have laws. However, the course of a revolution is easily foreseen, because stupidity and madness do have laws.
Oftentimes, a simple fit of impatience is enough to quickly bridge the distance between “utopian” and “murderer.”
The liberal, in every dire situation, runs and begs the conservative to save him from the consequences of his ideals.
The picturesque outfit of the revolutionary imperceptibly shifts into the severe uniform of the police officer.
Revolution—every revolution, revolution per se—is the matrix of the bourgeoisie.
A totalitarian state is the form in which societies crystallize under demographic pressures.
Faced with his failure, the reformer does not resign. Faced with the stubborn indocility of man, it does not occur to him that it may be prudent to apply more flexible techniques. Neither does the reformer suspect that, first and foremost, he ought to reform himself, his own principles and norms, his abrupt imperatives, excessive pretensions, and arrogant demands. Faced with his failure, the reformer blames man. Everywhere he sees crooked intentions, perverse wills. Man seems to conspire in favor of evil.
Then springs from his same love for man the severity of an angry father, whipping and punishing. His thwarted ambition, his hurt feelings, his broken dreams, cut straight to his heart. In this state, the reformer reveals himself as being singularly capable of violence and cruelty.
Will the revolutionary one day learn that revolutions prune rather than uproot?
In candid photographs of revolutionary episodes, the faces of participants seem half cretinous, half demented.
Every episode of a revolution needs a partisan to relate it and an adversary to explain it.
Revolutions are more a subject of sociology than history. Manifestations of those depths of human behavior that nothing educates, nothing civilizes, nothing ennobles; revolutions despoil man of his history and return him to animal behavior.
The fervor with which the Marxist invokes the future society would be moving, if the invocation rites were less bloody.
If it had fewer “saviors,” society would be less in need of saving.
The revolutionary adores and venerates the People as the source of his future riches.
An aristocratic government prepares individuals for self-sufficiency. That is why the anarchy of a revolutionary period within an aristocratic period, when the restrictive institutions disappear but their effect remains in the extraordinary intellectual and moral vigor of the citizens, results in spectacles of singular magnificence.
Insurrections are social phenomena; the revolution is a religious phenomenon.
To reform everyone else is an ambition which all mock yet which all share.
The masses seem to give in to the vigorous pressure that the revolutionary, determined, cold, cruel, and shrewd, exerts on them. Faced with this apparent brief meekness of history, an arid enthusiasm fills the soul of the victorious revolutionary. His prophecies, enforced by police and military techniques, empower him to mock skeptical spectators. Those grateful to have survived prepare to erect a cenotaph, where the sacrificial victims lay immolated to an enterprise finally triumphant.
But the stubborn routine of history undermines the proud and arbitrary constructions of the revolutionary. The tension, effort, constant vigilance, fatigue- all soon come to numb his proud soul. He becomes comfortable. Slowly, everything returns to the old ways. Time regains its lost power. The historical continuity invades, with its powerful waters, the vast farmlands, and, on that ground where once walked a proud man, posterity discovers only the corpse of a tortured innocent.
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
