Quotes from book
History and Utopia

Name: History and Utopia
Author: Emil M. Cioran

Emil M. CioranOriginal title Histoire et Utopie (French)

History and Utopia is an Emil Cioran's book published in 1960 which analyzes with depth vices and virtues of utopia.

“Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“Doutbless, revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim, or else we are tangled in the subtleties of remorse; so vengeance too has its venom, though it comes closer to what we are, to what we feel, to the very law of the self; it is also healthier than magnanimity. The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the Major intuition of ancient mythology.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

p. 70. https://books.google.com/books?id=5DuCDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT70 <br class="br">History and Utopia (1960)

“To act is to anchor in the imminent future.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“Ambition is a drug that makes its addicts potential madmen.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“To devastate by language, to blow up the word and with it the world.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“Tragic paradox of freedom: the mediocre men who alone make its exercise possible cannot guarantee its duration.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“Revenge is not always sweet: once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“We are born to exist, not to know, to be, not to assert ourselves.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“We are all secularised anarchists today.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“Never to have occasion to take a position, to make up one's mind, or to define oneself — there is no wish I make more often.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“The more intense a spiritual leader's appetite for power, the more he is concerned to limit it to others.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“Freedom can be manifested only in the void of beliefs, in the absence of axioms, and only where the laws have no more authority than a hypothesis.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“We understand God by everything in ourselves that is fragmentary, incomplete, and inopportune.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“No one can enjoy freedom without trembling.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“I seem to myself, among civilised men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

“Knowledge, having irritated and stimulated our appetite for power, will lead us inexorably to our ruin.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

History and Utopia (1960)

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