Nicolás Gómez Dávila Quotes

Colombian writer and philosopher (1913–1994)

Nicolás Gómez Dávila (18 May 1913 – 17 May 1994) was a Colombian writer and thinker considered one of the most intransigent political theoreticians of the twentieth century. He became known during the last few years of his life, particularly through German translations of his works. Gómez Dávila was one of the most radical critics of modernity; his work consists almost entirely of aphorisms he called escolios (that is, glosses or annotations).

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Alternative Names: Nicolas Gomez Davila

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To think like our contemporaries is a recipe for prosperity and stupidity.

Contemporary political ideologies are false in what they affirm and true in what they deny.

To compromise is to sacrifice a distant good to an immediate urgency.

Modern man destroys more when he builds than when he destroys.

The writer who loves or hates is less persuasive than the one who loves and hates.

God is a nuisance for modern man.

There is nothing more common than transforming a duty which inconveniences us into an "ethical problem."

The genuine reader is the one who reads for pleasure the books that others only study.

The liturgy can only be spoken definitively in Latin. In a vulgar tongue it is vulgar.

All literature is contemporary to the reader who knows how to read.

Every marriage of an intellectual with the communist party ends in adultery.

Nowadays public opinion is not the sum of private opinions. On the contrary, private opinions are an echo of public opinion.

In the idiom of modern architecture nothing complicated can be said.

Imperatives, ethical or esthetic, should be negative. Positive imperatives increase imposture.

In general, "historical necessity" turns out to be merely a name for human stupidity.