From Scholia to an Implicit Text

Democratic parliaments are not sites for debate but places where the people’s absolutism records its edicts.

The authenticity of the feeling depends on the clarity of the idea.

Refusing to admire is the token of the beast.

The more serious the problems, the greater the number of incompetents democracy summons to solve them.

For a democrat, freedom does not entail being able to say all he thinks but not having to think all he says.

As the waters of this century rise, delicate and noble feelings, voluptuous and fine pleasures, discreet and profound ideas take shelter in certain unique souls, like the survivors of the Flood upon a few silent summits.

Boundless tolerance is nothing but a hypocritical form of surrender.

Human warmth diminishes in a society as its legislation is perfected.

For fools, obsolete opinion and wrong opinion are synonymous.

Modern man is certain that he lives amidst a pluralism of opinions, whereas what prevails today is an asphyxiating unanimity.

Public political debate is not intellectually adult in any country.

A politician never says what he believes to be true, but what he deems to be effective.

Not one of the summit historical ages has been planned. Reformers can only be credited with mistakes.

The secret yearning of every civilised society is not to abolish inequality but to educate it.

The problem of increasing economic inflation would have a solution if modern mentality did not oppose an invincible resistance to any attempt to restrict human greed.

Modern mentality is a child of human pride inflated by commercial advertising.

Modern machines are every day more complicated, and modern man is every day more elementary.

What proves most striking about modern enterprises is the incongruity between the hugeness and intricacy of the technological paraphernalia and the almost nothingness of the end products.

When the populace awakes, first they shriek, then get drunk, plunder, murder, and finally go back to sleep.

A limitless naivety is required to be able to believe that the improvement of any social condition may be otherwise than slow, gradual, and unprompted.

Where Christianity disappears, greed, envy, and lust contrive a thousand ideologies to justify themselves.

Nothing is so important that it does not matter how 1t is written.

Writing is the only way of putting some distance between oneself and the century one had no choice but to be born in.