Reactionary Quotes

“Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they've been taught is wrong!”
― Émile Zola, The Masterpiece

“Being a reactionary is not about believing in certain solutions, but about having an acute sense of the complexity of the problems.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a una texto implícito: Selección

“The cultured man has the obligation to be intolerant.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito: Tomo II

“The pure reactionary is not a dreamer of abolished pasts, but a hunter of sacred shades on the eternal hills... The reactionary does not aspire to turn back, but rather to change direction. The past that he admires is not a goal but an exemplification of his dreams.”
― Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.”
― Nick Cohen

“Kings may usurp thrones, republics may be established, but the town scarcely stirs. Plassan sleeps while Paris fights.”
― Émile Zola, The Fortune of the Rougons

“My dear countrymen, I hope that you will live to see the day when you learn to believe in other gods than a few movie whores and a couple of prize-fighters.”
― Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen

“When you are constantly reacting to having been wronged (or perhaps to what you may regard as a wrong); when you are always giving in by practically living to defend, retaliating one time after another, again and again, you then spend double that time trying to prove the whole story: because to third parties, you will frequently appear to be on the attack, and therefore potentially receiving attacks once more - henceforth an unending pattern of misunderstood retaliations.”
― Criss Jami

“We are tossed about by external causes in many ways, and like waves driven by contrary winds, we waver and are unconscious of the issue and our fate.' We think we are most ourselves when we are most passionate, whereas it is then we are most passive, caught in some ancestral torrent of impulse or feeling, and swept on to a precipitate reaction which meets only part of the situation because without thought only part of a situation can be perceived.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“Those who had fought for what they called the revolution maintained a great pride: the pride of being on the correct side of the front lines. Ten or twelve years later (around the time of our story) the front lines began to melt away, and with them the correct side. No wonder the former supporters of the revolution feel cheated and are quick to seek substitute fronts; thanks to religion they can (in their role as atheists struggling against believers) stand again on the correct side and retain their habitual and precious sense of their own superiority.

But to tell the truth, the substitute front was also useful to others, and it will perhaps not be too premature to disclose that Alice was one of them. Just as the directress wanted to be on the correct side, Alice wanted to be on the opposite side. During the revolution they had nationalized her papa's shop, and Alice hated those who had done this to him. But how should she show her hatred? Perhaps by taking a knife and avenging her father? But this sort of thing is not the custom in Bohemia. Alice had a better means for expressing her opposition: she began to believe in God.”
― Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves

“It is life, not the individual, that is conscienceless. The essential, therefore, is to understand the time for which one is born. He who does not sense and understand its most secret forces, who does not feel in himself something cognate that drives him forward on a path neither hedged nor defined by concepts, who believes in the surface, public opinion, large phrases and ideals of the day — he is not of the stature for its events. He is in their power, not they in his. Look not back to the past for measuring-rods! Still less sideways for some system or other! There are times, like our own present and the Gracchan age, in which there are two most deadly kinds of idealism, the reactionary and the democratic. The one believes in the reversibility of history, the other in a teleology of history. But it makes no difference to the inevitable failure with which both burden a nation over whose destiny they have power, whether it is to a memory or to a concept that they sacrifice it. The genuine statesman is incarnate history, its directedness expressed as individual will and its organic logic as character.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

“The oligarchs are not philosophers; they pay people to be philosophers for them, and so the regnant ideology of the terminal phase of the American Empire is a mish-mash of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Foucault, as stitched together by Hollywood directors like Guillermo del Toro, (whose name translates into English as “of the bull”) and Bryan Singer for mass consumption. What they share is Nietzsche’s penchant for the transvaluation of all values (die Umwertung aller Werte) which entails role reversal as well.”
― E. Michael Jones

“Nostalgia is an excessive sentimentality for the past, for home. It is associated with a yearning to return to a happy and safe period in your life. The word comes from nóstos, meaning “homecoming”, and álgos, meaning “pain” or “ache”. It’s all about the “good old days”, and “the good times”. Conservatism revolves around nostalgia. All right wingers are nostalgic, and suffer from future shock and future fear. Science is about extreme nostalgia for the material atoms of the ancient Greeks. Materialism is entirely dead in the era of quantum mechanics, yet scientists go on believing in matter anyway. They are highly conservative individuals unwilling to contemplate leaving the home materialism has provided for them. The last thing they want is to end up in the Unknown Land of Mind, where thought, not matter, is core reality. That would ruin everything for the scientific materialists and empiricists.”
― Thomas Stark, Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason

“It came 'before the next' as what some may call the foundation - beyond traditions or old texts, and rationalizations: Education comes second, the progression of a nation; but 'Common Sense' is the treasure that sustains generations.”
― Criss Jami

“Do not be a Reactionary”
― David Sikhosana

“By mastering the slow art of nonreaction, we transform conflict into an opportunity for maturation. We learn to regulate our emotions, communicate far more effectively, and build stronger, more harmonious relationships.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time.”
― John Brockman

“The greatest honour in a reactionary country is to be a progressive man!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The vision of the Progressive has often been but to walk forward while facing backward; the business of the Reactionary, but that of walking backward while facing forward; henceforth the fallout is oftentimes, and obviously enough, but the formulation and the construction of obstacles in life and hurdles on-site, as long as there are cliffs on edge.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“This is one of many expressions which, colourless and even meaningless at first, have been developed into recognized terms of abuse by sloppy writers, prejudiced thinkers and powerful evangelists. The ordinary reasonable man has been trained to shudder away from a 'reactionary' as he does from a 'vested interest', though he may have no clear notion of the nature of either.
"What is a Reactionary?”
― A.P. Herbert, More Uncommon Law

“Here in the Arab world, we have no dreams, we are still searching for our rights and call it dreams.”
― Charif J Diab

“Destiny is not arbitrary or inimical; it is orderly and reactional. It gives us reactions to our own past actions.”
― Chaitanya Charan Das, Wisdom from The Ramayana: On Life and Relationships

“The victory of a reactionary idea is always a defeat for humanity!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The eighteenth century, which distrusted itself in nothing, as a matter of course, hesitated in nothing.”
― Joseph de Maistre, Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions and other Human Institutions

“[Nazis] would be the rocks against which the growing wave of revolution might be shattered.

Soon money began to flow to Hitler and the Nazis from those threatened interests. The Junkers and the industrialists believed they could control this strange leader who, they hoped, would help them keep their power over the masses. They were not disturbed by Hitler's anti-capitalist program. They believed it was only a trick to get the attention of the people.

Little did they know the true nature of the man they had decided to support. They had grabbed a dragon by the tail.”
― Louis L. Snyder, Hitler and Nazism

“We act out of courage. We react out of fear.”
― Aegelis, Sophizo

“Inside every reactionary mind there is a secret admiration for a progressive mind! This secret admiration sometimes causes the reactionary mind to evolve into a progressive one, or at least to display some progressive behaviour from time to time!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“The last French Bourbon to reign, Charles X, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI and of his brief successor, Louis XVIII, displayed a recurring type of folly best described as the Humpty-Dumpty type: that is to say, the effort to reinstate a fallen and shattered structure, turning back history. In the process, called reaction or counter-revolution, the reactionary right is bent on restoring the privileges and property of the old regime and somehow retrieving a strength it did not have before.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

“Senility is a relinquishment of life as it is in the here and now and the taking of refuge into the security and familiarity of the past. When life becomes too confusing, too complex, too strange, too much, then you turn away.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“True personal mastery is expressed in self-control and not reacting.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality