Raymond Aron Quotations

What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error.

Foreknowledge of the future makes it possible to manipulate both enemies and supporters.

Political thought in France is either nostalgic or Utopian.

Peace is impossible, war is improbable.

Skepticism cannot be revolutionary, even though it speaks the language of revolution.

Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.

In writing if it takes over 30 minutes to write the first two paragraphs select another subject.

In a way, all sociologists are akin to Marxists because of their inclination to settle everyone's accounts but their own.

The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinion merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The revolution provides him with his opium.

Racism is the snobbery of the poor.

Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings.