Raymond Aron Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Raymond Aron
Political thought, in France, is retrospective or utopian.

Raymond Aron
On the Cold War:
Peace impossible, war improbable.

Raymond Aron
The optimism of the Left was created and maintained by a strong feeling: admiration for the power of reason, certainty that the application of science to industry would revolu­tionise the order of human society and the condition of its individual members. The ancestral aspiration towards human brotherhood was united with faith in practical science in order to inspire either nationalism or socialism or both.

Raymond Aron
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.

Raymond Aron
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.

Raymond Aron
Communist interpretation is never wrong. Logicians will object in vain that a theory which exempts itself from all refutations escapes from the order of truth.

Raymond Aron
There is no correlation between the cause and the effect. The events reveal only an aleatory determination, connected not so much with the imperfection of our knowledge as with the structure of the human world.

Raymond Aron
Rational action is merely a question of calculating the chances.

Raymond Aron