The Opium of the Intellectuals Quotes

“The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual human beings, participates in communities, and respects the truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism. . . . If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe.

If they can abolish fanaticism, let us pray for the advent of the sceptics.”
― Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

“The intellectual ... must try never to forget the arguments of the adversary, or the uncertainty of the future, or the faults of one’s own side, or the underlying fraternity of ordinary men everywhere.”
― Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

“Profoundly moralistic in regard to the present, the revolutionary is cynical in action. He protests against police brutality, the inhuman rhythm of industrial production, the severity of bourgeois courts, the execution of prisoners whose guilt has not been proved beyond doubt. Nothing, short of a total ‘humanisation’, can appease his hunger for justice. But as soon as he decides to give his allegiance to a party which is as implacably hostile as he is himself to the established disorder, we find him forgiving, in the name of the Revolution, everything he has hitherto relentlessly denounced. The revolutionary myth bridges the gap between moral intransigence and terrorism.”
― Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

“Constitutional government, the balance of power, legal guarantees, the whole edifice of political civilisation slowly built up over the course of the ages and always incomplete, is calmly pushed aside. They accept an absolute State, allegedly in the service of the Revolution; they are not interested in the plurality of parties and the autonomy of working-class organisations. They do not protest against lawyers bullying their clients and accused persons confessing to imaginary crimes. After all, is not revolutionary justice directed towards the ‘radical solution of the problem of coexistence’, whilst ‘liberal justice’ applies unjust laws?”
― Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

“Are revolutions worthy of so much honour? The men who conceive them are not those who carry them out. Those who begin them rarely live to see their end, except in exile or in prison. Can they really be the symbol of a humanity which is the master of its own destiny if no man recognises his handiwork in the achievement which results from the savage free-for-all struggle?”
― Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

“Peace imposible, war improbable.”
― Rayman Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

“The so-called socialist societies rediscover, under modified forms, the necessities inherent in any modern economic system. There, just as under capitalism, the ‘boss class’ lays down the law. (...) Up to now the planners, by reason of penury and of the decision to develop economic power as rapidly as possible, have not concerned themselves either with the productivity of the various investments or with the consumers’ preferences. It will not be long before they experience the perils of slump and deflation and the exigencies of economic arithmetic.”
― Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

“A party which is always right must constantly define the correct line between sectarianism and opportunism. Where is this line situated? At an equal distance between the twin pitfalls of opportunism and sectarianism. But these pitfalls were themselves originally placed in relation to the correct line. The only way out of the vicious circle is a decree by the central authority which defines truth and error alike. And this decree is inevitably arbitrary, since it is made by a man who decides autocratically between individuals and groups; the disparity between the world as it would be if the original doctrine were true, and the world as it is, subordinates the truth to the equivocal and inscrutable decisions of an interpreter whose only qualification is his power.”
― Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals

“The massacres which accompany the struggle of States and of classes will not have been in vain if they clear the way to the classless society. The idolatry of history is born of this unavowed nostalgia for a future which would justify the unjustifiable. (...)
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... The idolater of history (...), convinced that it acts with a view to achieving the only future which is worthwhile, sees, and wants to see, the other merely as an enemy to be eliminated, and a contemptible enemy at that since he is incapable of wanting the good or of recognising it.”
― Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals