Tzvetan Todorov Quotes (9 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Tzvetan Todorov: 9 quotes0 likes

Famous Tzvetan Todorov Quotes

“The fear of barbarians is what risks making us barbarians.”

“For evil to take place, the acts of a few people are not sufficient; the great majority also has to remain indifferent. That is something of which we are all quite capable.”

Tzvetan Todorov

Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003)

“Democracy brought to others through the barrel of a gun is not democracy.”

Tzvetan Todorov

Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003)

“People who believe themselves to be the incarnation of good have a distorted view of the world.”

Tzvetan Todorov

Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003)

“Nothing is more commonplace than the reading experience, and yet nothing is more unknown. Reading is such a matter of course that at first glance it seems there is nothing to say about it.”

Tzvetan Todorov

Reading as Construction (1980)

“We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.”

Tzvetan Todorov

Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003)

“American society has always exercised a stronger pressure on individual behavior than Western European societies; but in time of war this pressure is notched a few degrees, and starts to become quite alarming.”

Tzvetan Todorov

The New World Disorder: Reflections of a European (2005)

“A maxim for the twenty-first century might well be to start not by fighting evil in the name of good, but by attacking the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found. We should struggle not against the devil himself but what allows the devil to live — Manichaean thinking itself.”

Tzvetan Todorov

paraphrased variant:
We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.
Source: Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003), Ch. 5 : The Past in the Present, p. 195

“Pride is not a wise counselor. People who believe themselves to be the incarnation of good have a distorted view of the world. The absence of any obstacle to the deployment of strength is dangerous for the strong themselves: passion takes precedence over reason. "No power without limit can be legitimate," as Montesquieu wrote long ago. Political wisdom does not consist in seeking only immediate victory, nor does it require systematic preference of "us" over "them."”

Tzvetan Todorov

Preface to the English edition (October 2002), p. xxi
Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003)