Freedom is the term used most without knowing what it means.
“Sexual liberation” allows modern man to pretend to be ignorant of the multiple taboos of another kind that govern him.
The leftist screams that freedom is dying when his victims refuse to finance their own murders.
The correct use of liberty can consist in adhering to a destiny, but my liberty consists in being able to refuse to do that.
The right to fail is an important right of man.
No one grants humanity certain extreme liberties except someone indifferent to its destiny.
Liberty is indispensable not because man knows what he wants and who he is, but so that he can find out who he is and what he wants.
If liberty is to last, it should be the goal of social organization and not the starting point.
Liberal parties never understand that the opposite of despotism is not stupidity, but authority.
To corrupt the individual it suffices to teach him to call his personal desires rights and the rights of others abuses.
Man conceals under the name of liberty his hunger for sovereignty.
The reactionary does not condemn the bourgeois mentality, but rather its predominance.
What we reactionaries deplore is the absorption of the aristocracy and the people by the bourgeoisie.
It is the emasculation of liberty or, alternatively, of equality.
Where equality allows freedom to enter, inequality slips in.
Without a hierarchical structure it is not possible to transform freedom from a fable into a fact.
The liberal always discovers too late that the price of equality is the omnipotent state.
They started out calling liberal institutions democratic, and they ended up calling democratic despotisms liberal.
Where everyone believes he has a right to rule, everyone eventually prefers that one man alone rule.
The tyrant frees each individual from the tyranny of his neighbor.
Peace does not flourish except among moribund nations. Under the sun of iron hegemonies.
Several civilizations were plundered because freedom inadvertently opened the gate to the enemy.
Man tends to exercise all his powers. The impossible seems to him the only legitimate limit.
A civilized man, however, is one who for various reasons refuses to do everything he can.
For the trunk of individuality to grow, one must prevent freedom from making the trunk spread out into branches.
Only liberty limits the abusive interventions of ignorance.
Politics is the science of social structures made suitable for the common life of ignorant beings.
Political science is the art of quantifying the amount of freedom man can handle and the amount of servitude he needs.
Democratic parliaments are not forums where debates take place, but rather where popular absolutism registers its decrees.
To find oneself at the mercy of the people’s whims, thanks to universal suffrage, is what liberalism calls the guarantee of freedom.
A man is called a liberal if he does not understand that he is sacrificing liberty except when it is too late to save it.
By the same measure that the state grows, the individual shrinks.
The necessary and sufficient condition of despotism is the disappearance of every kind of social authority not conferred by the State.
It is no longer enough for the citizen to submit—the modern state demands accomplices.
The state is totalitarian by its essence.
Total despotism is the form towards which it spontaneously tends.
Modern society tramples liberties underfoot, like a column of tanks tramples a procession of pious women.
The freer man believes he is, the easier it is to indoctrinate him.
When they define property as a social function, confiscation is near; when they define work as a social function, slavery is on its way.
To reform society through laws is the dream of the incautious citizen and the discrete preamble to every tyranny.
Law is the juridical form of custom or the trampling of liberty.
Law is the easiest method of exercising tyranny.
When the tyrant is the anonymous law, modern man believes he is free.
The increase in freedom on the one hand, and the increase in regulation on the other, work together perfectly to demoralize society.
Neither a declaration of human rights, nor the proclamation of a constitution, nor an appeal to natural law, protects against the arbitrary power of the state.
The only barrier to despotism is customary law.
In the incoherence of a political constitution resides the only authentic guarantee of liberty.
In every historical situation there always arises somebody to defend in the name of liberty, humanity, or justice, the stupid opinion.
The conscience discovers its freedom when it feels obliged to condemn what it approves.
To the masses what matters is not whether they are free, but whether they believe they are free.
Whatever cripples their freedom does not alarm them, unless they are told it should.
In order to distract the people while they exploit it, stupid despots choose circus fights, whereas the astute despot prefers electoral fights.
Upon finding himself perfectly free, the individual discovers that he has not been relieved of everything, but despoiled.
Those who remove man’s chains free only an animal.
To liberate man is to subject him to greed and sex.
Humanity longs to free itself from poverty, from toil, from war—from everything which few escape without degrading themselves.
Being of “divine right” limited the monarch; the “representative of the people” is the representative of absolute Absolutism.
Reactionary thought breaks into history as concrete liberty’s shout of warning, as the spasm of anguish in the face of the unlimited despotism arrived at by the man intoxicated with abstract liberty.
Freedom, for the democrat, consists not in being able to say everything he thinks, but in not having to think about everything he says.
In ages of complete freedom, indifference to the truth grows so much that nobody makes the effort to confirm a truth or to refute it.
Liberty is the right to be different; equality is a ban on being different.
Nobody is ignorant of the fact that historical events are made up of four factors: necessity, coincidence, spontaneity, freedom.
Nevertheless, it is rare to find a historiographical school that does not seek to reduce them to a single factor.
Man’s freedom does not free him from necessity.
But twists it into unforeseeable consequences.
History is indeed the history of freedom—not of an essence “Freedom,” but of free human acts and their unforeseeable consequences.
source: Don Colacho's Aphorisms
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