"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."

--

Source : Raymond Aron (2001). “The Opium of the Intellectuals”, p.257, Transaction Publishers

Raymond Aron

#Intellectual Quotes #Atheism Quotes #Want Quotes

“Joy may you have and gentle hearts content Of your loves couplement: And let faire Venus, that is Queene of love, With her heart-quelling Sonne upon you smile”
“There's no way New Orleans will ever be the city it was. I think it will have half the population. They may create a sort of Disneyland at the French Quarter for tourists. The rest I don't know”
“It's funny. I'm attracted to things that don't have any impact on life. People say I've done a great thing for women. I don't think I have. People say I've given people courage. That makes me feel good, but I don't see how I do that. I think my running is a selfish thing. But it provides the challenge that allows me to feel good about myself. How can I expect to do well in other activities if I don't feel good about myself?”
“One thing most of us agree on is that the universe exists (people who deny that usually follow some trade other than science), so if some theoretical particle interaction would lead ultimately to the nonexistence of the universe, then you can save a lot of electricity by not trying to demonstrate it.”

Source : Joe Haldeman (1998). “Forever Peace”, p.24, Penguin
“One cannot have a right to life without the right to defend it with deadly force.”
“The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief”
“Take care not to begin anything of which you may repent.”
“Cheap music, childish images, the vulgate in language, in its crassest sense, can penetrate to the deeps of our necessities and dreams. It can assert irrevocable tenure there. The opening bars, the hammer-beat accelerando of Edith Piaf's Je ne regrette rien - the text is infantile, the tune stentorian, and the politics which enlisted the song unattractive - tempt every nerve in me, touch the bone with a cold burn and draw me into God knows what infidelities to reason, each time I hear the song, and hear it, uncalled for, recurrent inside me.”

Source : George Steiner (2010). “Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say?”, p.210, Faber & Faber

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