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

--

Source : Raymond Aron (2017). “The Opium of the Intellectuals”, p.156, Routledge

Raymond Aron

#Errors Quotes #Optimism Quotes #Intelligence Quotes

“pull a string, a puppet moves ... each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly: the cat, the woman, the job, the front tire, the bed, the walls, the room; all our necessities including love, rest on foundations of sand -- and any given cause, no matter how unrelated: the death of a boy in Hong Kong or a blizzard in Omaha ... can serve as your undoing. all your chinaware crashing to the kitchen floor, your girl will enter and you'll be standing, drunk, in the center of it and she'll ask: my god, what's the matter? and you'll answer: I don't know, I don't know ...”
“Hope is the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard.”
“She moved with such purpose it was as though she walked with exclamation marks.”
“Everyone wants to get a piece of me.”
“I love you. I know the real you too. You think I don't but how easily you forget I was the one who bailed you out of trouble over and over again as kids. I didn't ask the perfect Ashton to be my girlfriend when I was fourteen years old. I asked the only Ash I'd ever known. You changed all on your own. I'm not going to lie. I was proud of the girl you had become. My world was complete. I had the perfect family, perfect girl, perfect future. I let myself forget the other girl you once were.”
“I will never again stand on the pitch as a professional player. But I won't stop playing the game.”
“If there was a way to recognize something you'd never seen but still knew by heart, I felt it as I looked at his face. Finally, someone understood.”
“The jingling of a fat purse always commands the world.”

Source : David Gerrold (1993). “Under the Eye of God”, Spectra

You may also like:

Albert Camus
Author
Alexis de Tocqueville
Historian
Hannah Arendt
Philosopher
Hans Morgenthau
Correspondent
Jean Francois Revel
Journalist
Jean-Paul Sartre
Philosopher
Leon Blum
Prime Minister of France
Max Weber
Sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu
Sociologist