Raymond Aron - The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955)

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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

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