Nicolás Gómez DávilaThinkers

Aesthetics submits more readily to man’s whims when divorced from ethics. And vice-versa.

Aesthetics is another discipline in which one only reaches heaven by the uneven road and through the narrow gate.

Allusion is the only way to express what is intimate without distorting it.

The American is not intolerable because he believes he is important individually, but because he possesses, insofar as he is an American, the solution to every problem.

Applause is a thing in which there is always a claque.

A Bureaucracy ultimately always ends up costing the people more than an upper class.

Capitalism is the only barrier in modern society to the spontaneous totalitarianism of the industrial system.

Catastrophe is the only way that humanity is cured of its diseases. Man has never known how to renounce at the right time.

The Church is tasked not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even to adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld in the world.

Civilization is not a simple continuum. In addition to civilized societies and semi-civilized societies, there are pseudo-civilized societies.

Civilization's enemy is less the external adversary as it is internal attrition.

The Classic is that which educates because it ignores the basic postulates of the modern mind.