Selected quotes:
Thanks to the suggestion of habit, men know what to say, do and think every day.
To belong to a school of thought is to lose one's personality; not to belong to one is to abdicate all possibility of prestige.
Vanity is a powerful source of satisfaction for fools. It permits them to substitute for qualities they never will have, the conviction of always having them.
Sentiments are the basis of existence. The day when cold reason would replace the devotion, pity, love, and illusions that guide us, all the mainsprings of activity would be broken.
The evolution of sentiments is independent of will. No one can love or hate at will.
In matters of sentiments, illusion quickly creates certitude.
The strength of sentimental evidence is that it doesn't take rational evidence into account.
What is done through pride is superior to what is accomplished from duty.
To demonstrate that a thing is rational doesn't always prove that it is reasonable.
Man knows only two absolute certainties: please and pain. They orient all his individual and social life.
Above all, happiness is hope of realization not yet attained.
The real length of life doesn't depend on the number of one's days but on the diversity of sensations accumulated during those days.
Intuition often is superior to reason. It permits poorly reasoned woman to predict things incomprehensible to well-reasoned men.
According to various fields of activity woman is inferior or superior to man. She rarely is his equal.
Woman never forgives a man for guessing what she thinks behind what she says.
To dominate or to be dominated is the only alternative for the feminine soul.
Women reproach men for not understanding them, but where are those of different mentality who ever understood one another.
In love, one demands words for fear of hearing thoughts.
Love elevates or degrades; it never permits us to remain ourselves.
To try to hold on to a dying love is like trying to slow the passage of time.
The majority of men's opinions are founded not on deduction but on hate, sympathy and hope.
Environment creates our opinions. Only passion and self-interest change them.
It requires very independent mind to arrive at five or six personal opinions in the course of a lifetime.
To dispute the worth of an affective or mystical opinion is to strengthen it.
Crowds don't create opinion but give it its strength. A popular opinion quickly becomes contagious.
The power of public opinion is irresistible. One can only dominate it by creating it; if one doesn't know how to create it, one must submit to it.
The more a word goes into general usage, the more it takes on different meanings according to the mentality of those who use it.
The incompression ruling relations among beings of different race, social situation and sex is irreducible because the same words evoke different ideas to them. One can therefore say that in reality they do not speak the same language.
In politics, things are less important than their names. To disguise even the most absurd ideas with well-chosen words often is enough to gain their acceptance.
With many men, words take precedence over thought. They only know what they think after having heard what they said.
The art of persuasion has five chapters: affirmation; repetition; prestige; suggestion; contagion.
Mental contagion is the surest agent of the propagation of opinions and beliefs. Political convictions are not founded by other means and are afterward given a rational aspect in order to justify them.
If general beliefs are almost always wrong, it is because they represent a single individual's illusion spread by contagion.
Repeated often enough, the most disastrous theories end by being incorporated into our subconscious and become a driving force for action.
It is easier to rule people by exciting their emotions than by protecting their interests.
He who possess prestige has no need of force.
Prestige can replace force, but force cannot replace prestige.
Force can command obedience, but prestige removes even the idea of disobedience.
No voluntary obedience without respect; no respect without prestige.
An error crowned with prestige always will be more powerful than a truth without prestige.
There are no pure races except among primitives. Among civilized peoples, the repetition of crossing and similarity of environment has created new historic races analogous to pure races.
The psychological characteristics of an historic race are as stable as its anatomical characteristics. They are transmitted by heredity with regularity and persistence.
The history of a people is the recital of its efforts to stabilize it's soul and thus emerge from barbarism.
The strength of a people resides less in the power of its armed forces than in its community of sentiments engendered by the solidity of its national soul. The national soul of the Romans enabled them to rule the world. When they lost their soul, their power vanished.
Regressive evolution being much faster than ascendant evolution, people take centuries to acquire a certain mental structure and sometimes lose it very fast.
A civilized people is a crowd whose soul was stabilized during the very slow ancestral accumulations.
Crowds make revolutions; soul of a race shortens the duration.
Every historic race and every phase of its life imply certain institutions, certain morals, certain arts, certain philosophies and no others. No people has adopted a foreign civilization without entirely transforming it.
To try to impose our institutions, our customs and our laws on the natives of colony is to try to substitute the past of one race for that of another.
Only heredity can struggle against heredity. The crossing of unequal individuals disaggregates the ancestral soul of the race. Many nations perished for not having understood this.
The half-breed is a man who floats among contrary ancestral impulses of intelligence, morality and character.
A population of half-breeds is ungovernable.
The soul of the living is above all composed of the thoughts of the dead.
The dead are terribly tyrannical.
To create ideas which influence men is to put a little of oneself into life of one's descendants.
A man who is the part of a crowd ceases to be himself. His conscious personality vanishes into the info unconscious soul of the crowd. He loses all critical spirit, all ability to reason and returns to primitiveness.
A crowd is an amorphous being incapable of will or action without a leader. Since the crowd's sentiments are exaggerated, it demands that the leader's be too.
It is much easier to influence a crowd then an individual.
It is its sense of power and irresponsibility that gives the crowd its intolerance and excessive arrogance.
The crowd must have a fetish - a personage, doctrine or formula.
Crowds always are impressed by power, only rarely by goodness.
Crowds respect only the strong. Disdain for the weak is their law.
Great assemblies possess the same characteristics as crowds: mediocre Intellectual level, excessive excitability, sudden furors, complete intolerance and servile obedience to leaders.
The mediocre man augments his worth by belonging to a group; the superior man diminishes it.
The only way to influence the individuals in a group is first to influence its leaders.
A brutal daring minority will always lead a fearful, irresolute majority.
The fate of a people depends much more on their character than on their intelligence.
Crowds generally prefer equality in servitude to liberty.
When the social brakes restraining the multitude's instincts are removed, they return very quickly to their ancestral barbarism.
A people's ancestral soul dominates all its evolution. Political upheavals modify only the manifestation of this soul.
No people can try to break abruptly with its forebears without profoundly affecting the course of its history.
Latian nations quickly grow more tired of liberty than of servitude.
People who have no acquired an internal discipline are condemned to submit to an external discipline.
The elite of people create it's progress; the middle classes it's strength.
No people with a fast growing population can remain pacifist. It ends by invading neighbours whose population is stationary.
The civilization of a people is the outward clothing of its soul, the visible expression of the invisible forces that control it.
Peoples, like all living beings, disappear when they have become so stabilized by a long past that they are incapable of adopting themselves to a new conditions of existence.
A strong faith renders a people unconquerable only for so long as they do not face a stronger faith.
Political institutions do not create the sentiments of a people; institutions are created by their sentiments.
Individual tyranny is near when groups are able to avoid the law.
Nature ignores justice. Equity is a creation of man.
Justice begins only at the moment when one has the power to impose it.
Law and justice play no role in the relations of peoples of unequal strength.
One cannot contrast law and power, because power and law are only labels. Law is power that endures.
Moral laws are not fictitious entities but imperious necessities.
Morals represent the synthesis of the social needs of an epoch. Owning to the sole fact that a society wants to exist, it is obliged to have an irreducible criterion of good and evil.
No civilization can endure without morals.
To try to base morals on reason, as so many philosophers do, is a dangerous illusion. Morals deprived of affective or mystical support are without duration and strength.
Environment and example are the two great generators of morals.
It sometimes takes generations for a people to acquire morals and only a few years for it to lose them.
The morals of a people represent their scale of values.
The minimum possible morals are those codified by law and imposed by the police. The moment that the minimum is no longer respected, anarchy begins.
One can consider it to be a grave symptom of decadence when the morality of the ruling classes falls below of those who are govern.
Whenever humanitarianism flourises, morals decline.
Crime in any nation grows with the development of humanitarianism. Ceaselessly limiting repression, humanitarianism reduced inhibiting action and punishment.
To excuse evil is to multiply it.
The more a people possesses internal discipline, and therefore a stable morality, the higher it rises in civilization.
People disappear quickly from history when their morality begins to come apart.
People whose ideals are strong and needs meager always will triumph over those whose needs are great and ideals mediocre.
Revolutions and anarchy represent the ransom a people must pay for a change of ideal.
To destroy the ideal of an individual, a class, or a people is to take away a that made for cohesion, greatness and motivation for action.
To devote longtime effort toward setting up an ideal and just as much effort in destroying it is the cycle of a people.
It is not necessary to multiple gods. Under various names, man has adorned during all ages only one divinity - hope.
Man sometimes changes the name of his gods but never can do without them. Mysticism seems to be indestructible need of the spirit.
Mystical logic can dominate affective logic to the point of nullifying the instinct for self-preservation.
Incapable of living without certitude, man always will prefer the most untenable beliefs to the most justified negations.
If atheism were to triumph, it would become a religion as intolerant as the ald faiths.
Free thinking is often nothing but a belief that avoids the effort of thinking.
It ialways is imprudent to try to rationalize one's faith.
Religions constitute a force to use, never to combat.
People rarely survive the death of their gods.
Like politics, art is guided by a few leaders followed by a crowd of followers.
Mental contagion is so powerful in art that one can ascertain in an epoch a familiar air enabling recognition of the time of its creation.
Man, confined by nature to the ephemeral, dreams of the eternal. In rising temles and statues, he indulges in the illusion of having created things that never will perish.
The true artist creates even when he copies.
There is no place in society for someone who pretends to be emancipated from rites and disdains symbols.
Justice deprived of rites and symbols would no longer be justice.
A religious or political belief can be found on faith but cannot endure without rites and symbols.
The power of rites is so great that they often survive long after the disappearance of the faith that gave birth to them.
Rites avoid man's uncertainties. Thanks to rites, he knows without thinking what he should say and do in all circumstances.
Knowledge establishes truths; belief incorporates our desires; that is why man always will prefer belief to knowledge.
Reason is crushed against the wall of belief.
To create belief is to create a new conscience generating new conduct.
The slightest change in people's beliefs modifies their destiny.
Whenever a question raises violently contradictory opinions, one can be sure that it belongs to the cycle of belief and not to that of knowledge.
Divergences of rational origin are easily tolerated; the antagonisms of belief are intolerant. Religions and political struggle always will be violent.
An hypothesis often is a belief mistaken for knowledge.
Rationally contradictory things are easily reconciled in a mind hypnotised by belief.
Not to believe things to be possible is to render them impossible. One of the strengths of faith is to ignore the impossible.
The strength of a nation isn't measured by the number of the population but by the worth of its elites.
Created by the elite, civilization can progress only by it. Deprived of elites, a nation wood soon fall into misery and anarchy.
The people are the great reservoir of energy in a country, but this energy cannot be used unless it is channeled by an elite.
Aristocracy has always taken on different forms: birth, talent or fortune. The world never has been able to do without an aristocracy.
Intellectual aristocracy must seem as unfair to the egalitarian crowd as the ancient nobility. Birth soon confers intellectual qualities in the same manner as it used to confer privileges.
The struggle of the blind multitude against the elites is an historical continuity. The triumph of the more numerous has marked the end of several civilizations.
Great civilizations prospered only by knowing how to dominate their inferior elements.
The elite create, the plebeians destroy.
The logic of the universe is too different from our logic for us to hope to penetrate its secrets.
If we were to describe as miracle all that his incomprehensible, the life of any being must be considered as a perpetual miracle.
The smallest living cell carries within itself an immense past and mysterious future.
Is the world created or uncreated, real or unreal, humanity durable or ephemeral? Philosophy, which used to try to answer such questions, nowadays renounces their solution.
Certain dangerous questions - where do we come from? where are we going? - ought not to be too much discussed in order to leave a cloud of doubt which doesn't blot out all hope.
Of the three possible concepts of life - optimistic, pessimistic and resigned - the last one is perhaps the wisest but also the least motivating of action.
To revolt or to adapt oneself; there is no other choice in life.
Every phenomenon has its mystery. A mystery is the unknown soul of things.
Science is in reality man's revolt against nature, his effort to escape the blind forces that oppress him.
The most precise scientific laws are valid only for a limited portion of time and space.
The two great constants of the universe are resistance and movement. The first is composed of inertia, and the second of energy.
The terrain of science is known but represents only a little island in a boundless sea of things unknown.
Scientific achievements merely displace within the infinite the barriers separating us from the inconceivable.
Materialism is a pretended substitute for religions, but today matter has become as mysterious as the gods it replaces.
One of the superiorities of the savant over ignoramus is that the savant senses where mystery begins.
Science creates more mysteries than it elucidates.
The need for certainty always has been greater than the need for truth.
The practical value of a truth is measured by the degree of beliefs it inspires.
Cloth seductively, error often wins acceptance as truth.
Truth is not an entity or commodity or utility but a necessity.
Before science, man knew only subjective truths; the role of savants was to create impersonal truths.
The centuries transform most of our truths into errors.
Many men easily do without truth but none is strong enough to do without illusions.
It is in pursuing an illusion that man often has achieved progress he did not seek.
Error probably has rendered more services to man than truth.
History unfurls itself outside of reason and often against reason.
The mental life of each generation is derived from preceding generations.
Legend generally is truer than history. The former translates people's real feelings; the later tells about happenings deformed by the narrator's mentality.
Psychological conflicts rule history. The great upheavals occur more because of conflicts of beliefs than opposition of interest.
The unreal still is the driving force of the world.
Intelligence makes one think. Belief makes one act.
Had man begun to think before he acted, the cycle of history would have been ended long ago.
Only action reveals the nature of our intelligence and worth of our character.
To think is useful, but to act without too much thinking often is necessary. The great acts of heroism generally were due to men who didn't think first.
To know what one ought to do is not always to know what one is going to do.
The word democracy signifies entirely different ideas to the crowd and to scholars.
Dominated by a need for equality, popular democracy repulses fraternity among classess and doesn't give a fig for liberty. On the contrary, democracy among the intellectuals is avid for liberty and cares little for equality.
The true democrat is a member of a group who has no individuality outside his group.
Contrary to democratic ideas, the psychology of the collective entity called The People is much inferior to that of an isolated man.
Hatred of despotism and love of liberty always have been proclaimed by peoples well adjusted to despotism and very poorly to liberty.
Democratic ideas are among those which are gladly imposed on others but rarely accepted for oneself.
The more the law proclaims equality, the more there developes the need for exterior signs inequality.
The thirst for equality often is an expression of the desire to have interiors and no superiors.
The artificial notion of equality has given rise to hatred of all those superiorities that constitute the greatness of a nation.
Nature does not recognize equality. The only progress has been through increasing inequalities.
Far from equalising men, civilization accentuates their differentiation more and more each day.
By attributing imaginary powers to science, democracy makes a false god of it.
Socialism, ultimate form of the principle of equality, is a mental state more than a doctrine.
Democracy and socialism, despite appearances, are separated by a profound abyss.
Socialism, which preaches the equalitization of conditions, is in obvious opposition to the democracy of the intellectuals who pretend to be able to achieve the triumph of the more capable.
The hard-heartedness of certain capitalists and the weakness of their morality create many followers of socialism.
When the state tries to protect its citizens too much, they lose their habit of protecting themselves and as a result lose all initiative.
Most beliefs do not bring on disillusion because their paradise is located in downtown here on earth.
The stingy happiness and equality in servitude promised by socialism do not form a strong enough ideal to impassion peoples for a very long time.
Because of its progress, modern civilization creates an ever-increasing mass of unadapted people always ready to struggle against it. They form the majority of socialists.
To live is to struggle. Struggle is universal. Non-combative beings would have made no progress.
If nature had not been pitiless toward the week, the world would be peopled by monsters and no civilization would have taken place.
Only people with lots of cannons have the right to be pacifists.
To withdraw in the face of effort one believes to be useless is to remounce all success in advance.
Fear of be defeated increases the chances of defeat. An army persuaded of its superiority doubles its courage and changes of victory.
Individual courage is rarer than collective courage.
Economic interests lead people to long for peace, but their differences of feeling and beliefs always push them into war.
A truly pacifist people would quickly disappear from history.
The only lasting revolutions are those of thought.
Scientific revolutions are uniquely derived from reason; political and religious revolutions derive from affective, mystical and collective elements.
Scientific revolutions transform people's lives much more than political revolutions.
Revolutions, like wars, represent the externalization of conflicts between psychological forces.
The really miserable man is one persuaded that his condition is miserable.
Mental contagion is the most powerful factor in a revolution.
The majority of men want to be led, not to revolt.
Among certain men, revolution is a mental state. No concession could appease it.
The beginning of revolution generally arises from the ending of beliefs.
To be guided by wrong but popular opinions is the imperative condition of all democratic governments.
Inflation, humanitarianism and fear always are the great factors in the conduct of democratic governments.
Limited by fear of responsibility, individual despotism always is less oppressive than collective despotism, which always is irresponsible.
Individual tyranny is easily overthrown. Against collective tyranny, the oppressed have no force.
What one detests in a tyranny is not always tyranny itself but the individuals who exercise it.
The worst tyrants are easily accepted for so long as they remain anonymous.
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