See the list of topic categories here.
In our time, rebellion is either reactionary, or it is nothing but a hypocritical and facile farce.
To be a reactionary is to understand that man is a problem without a human solution.
The left and the right have signed, against the reactionary, a secret pact of perpetual aggression.
Not slandering power, but distrusting it deeply, is characteristic of the reactionary.
Reactionary thought: incomparably lucid, incomparably impractical.
The intelligent man soon reaches reactionary conclusions. Today, however, the consensus of fools turns him into a coward. When they publicly question him, he denies being a Galilean.
A reactionary, today, is merely a traveler who suffers a shipwreck with dignity.
Though he knows he cannot win, the reactionary has no desire to lie.
The reactionary not only has the nose to sniff out the absurd, he also has the palate to savor it.
Reactionary thought has been accused of irrationalism because it refuses to sacrifice the canons of reason to the prejudice of the day.
…Slandered, like a reactionary.
The defeated reactionary can always, at least, entertain himself with the simplicity of the victor’s ideas.
The reactionary does not yearn for the vain restoration of the past, but for the unlikely rupture of the future from this sordid present.
The leftist who protests equally against the crimes of the left or right is called by his comrades, and rightly so, a reactionary.
A reactionary is anyone who is not prepared to buy his victory at any price.
If the left continues adopting, one after another, the objections that we reactionaries have raised against the modern world, we will have to become leftists.
Readers of a reactionary text never know whether they should clap enthusiastically or jeer in anger.
The reactionary does not condemn the bourgeois mentality, but its predominance. What reactionaries deplore is the absorption of the aristocracy and the common people by the bourgeoisie.
I do not belong to a world that is perishing. I extend and transmit the message of a truth that does not die.
The reactionary does not become a conservative except in those ages which maintain something worthy of being conserved.
It is not a restoration for which the reactionary yearns, but a new miracle.
I am the haven of all notions banished by modern ignominy.
The reactionary does not respect everything history brings, but respects only what it brings.
What the reactionary says never interests anybody. Neither when he says it, because it seems absurd; nor a few years later, because it seems obvious.
With the exception of the reactionary, today there are only candidates for managerial positions in modern society.
Even the farthest right of any right always seems too far to the left for me.
To be a reactionary is to understand that it is not possible to demonstrate or convince, only to invite.
The Marxist does not doubt the perversity of his adversary. The reactionary merely suspects his adversary is stupid.
We reactionaries provide fools the pleasure of feeling like daring avant-garde thinkers.
The ideal of the reactionary is not a utopian paradise. It is a society similar to that which existed in the peaceful intervals of the old European society, of Alteuropa, before the demographic, industrial, and democratic catastrophe.
The reactionary does not advise what is possible, but professes what is necessary.
The left calls those situated just to their right “rightists.”
The reactionary is not to the right of the left, but in front of it.
The new left today is full of disoriented and helpless reactionaries.
To be a reactionary is to defend causes that do not play on the chessboard of history, causes where losing does not matter.
A woman has the intellectual temperament of the environment in which she lives: vehement revolutionary or staunch conservative, according to the circumstances. A reactionary she can never be.
We reactionaries are unfortunate: the left steals our ideas and the right our vocabulary.
To reveal the fool there is no better reagent than the word “medieval.”
He immediately sees red.
The reactionary does not wish to go back in time, but to change course. The past he admires is not a goal, but one example.
The most convinced reactionary is the repentant revolutionary, that is to say: the one who has known the reality of the problems and has discovered the falsity of the solutions.
Reactionary texts appear obsolete to contemporaries but surprisingly relevant to posterity.
The reactionary is not a nostalgic dreamer of a canceled past, but rather a hunter of sacred shades upon the eternal hills.
The soul naturally inclined toward democracy feels that neither its defects, nor its vices, nor its crimes, affect its substantial excellence.
The reactionary, on the other hand, feels that all corruption ferments in his soul.
The reactionaries objection is not discussed; it is disdained.
If the progressive casts himself into the future, and the conservative into the past, the reactionary does not measure his anxieties with the history of yesterday or the history of tomorrow. The reactionary does not applaud what the dawn will bring, nor does he cling to the last shadows of the night. His home rises in that luminous space where the essential calls to him with its immortal presence.
The reactionary does not write to convince. He merely transmits to his future accomplices the files of a sacred trial.
Social forces of today have carved their path in bedrock, and nothing will change their course until they empty into a smooth and unknown plain. The thrashing of castaways only causes their bodies to float along a further bank.
But if the reactionary is powerless in our time, his condition obliges him to bear witness to his revulsion. Freedom, for the reactionary, is submission to a mandate.
The reactionary escapes becoming a slave to history because he pursues in the human wilderness the trace of divine footsteps.
I do not offer a catechism or practical prescriptions. I only want to draw a sharp curve. Idle studies. Cold glosses. The reactionary texts are no more than steles among rubble.
See also, Dávila on Progress, Resignation and Revolution & Reform
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 book cover, from Olde Books
