Aphorisms of the Present Time

This book aims to condense into aphorisms some of the ideas scattered throughout my various works.

Thanks to its brief form, the aphorism impresses the mind and is easily retained. For these reasons it constitutes one of the most widespread of literary genres.

Most of our truths—that is, the ideas we form of things—present themselves to the mind in a concise form. Human experience has always been synthesized in proverbs and maxims, which are the aphorisms of nations. Man thinks by aphorisms and guides himself by aphorisms. The aphorism spares him from long reflection before acting.

These advantages are not without their drawbacks. The aphorism represents, in fact, the conclusion of a demonstration that the reader must supply for himself.

When that demonstration is easily guessed, the aphorism verges on the truism; when it is not grasped, the aphorism remains unintelligible. It seems therefore condemned to express only very general and often self-evident truths. Such is precisely the case with most proverbs.

If I have not hesitated to include in this book certain propositions whose evidence is not immediately compelling, it is because their demonstration is to be found in my works. This little volume is their synthesis.

GUSTAVE LE BON

Paris, March 1913.

One does not conduct oneself with one's intelligence but with one's character.

The self is composed of an aggregate of ancestral elements that are often heterogeneous. Its unity is as fictitious as that of an army.

The psychology of each individual is formed of superimposed psychologies: that of his race, his family, his group. A man can rarely escape this crushing addition of forces.

Sudden transformations of character arise from the fact that certain events call forth one of the many personalities that slumber within us.

It is impossible to judge a being's feelings by his conduct in a single instance. The man of one circumstance is not the man of all circumstances.

To know a man, one must study him in times of great crisis, and above all of revolution. Then alone are the various possibilities of his character revealed.

The constancy of character represents, above all, the constancy of the milieu.

The reasons we assign to our acts rarely constitute their true motives. They serve chiefly to justify the sentimental and mystical impulses that made us act.

The contradictions of conduct often arise from the divergence between the conscious will and the unconscious will.

Since the unconscious intelligence and will are sometimes superior to the conscious intelligence and will, men who reason very badly may act very well.

To assume in others feelings identical to those that govern us is to condemn oneself never to understand them.

Thanks to the suggestions of habit, men know each day what must be said, done, and thought.

The irresolute being is guided not by his true desires, but by those he imagines himself to have at the moment when he is forced to act.

When one does not hinder others by one's will, one often harms them by one's inertia.

Popular heroes do not always possess the character attributed to them, but they often end by acquiring it.

Important works result more rarely from a single great effort than from an accumulation of small ones.

The proverb “He who can do the greater can do the lesser” is not always accurate. Superior minds sometimes succeed better at difficult things than at easy ones.

Vanity is, for fools, a powerful source of satisfaction. It allows them to substitute, for the qualities they will never acquire, the conviction of having always possessed them.

No need to be praised when one is sure of oneself. He who seeks praise doubts his own worth.

To belong to a school is to lose one's personality; not to belong to a school is to renounce all possibility of prestige.

Great thoughts come from the mind and not from the heart, as has been maintained; but it is from the heart that they draw their force.

Character and intelligence being rarely united, one must resign oneself to choosing one's friends for their character and one's acquaintances for their intelligence.

In sensitive natures, the soul is a shifting sea, upon which the light of things is reflected each day with different shades.

Great mental superiorities are somewhat comparable to botanical monstrosities artificially created. Their offspring always reverts to the average type of the species.

One is not master of one's desires; one often is of one's will.

Nothing resists a strong and sustained will: neither nature, nor men, nor even fate itself.

A strong will most often has a strong desire for its support. Desire is the soul of the will.

Feelings are the foundation of existence. The day when devotion, pity, love, and the illusions that guide us should be replaced by cold reason, all the mainsprings of activity would be broken.

The role of reason appeared very late in the history of our planet. Through heaped-up ages, beings lived and were transformed without it.

The evolution of feelings is independent of the will. No one can love or hate at will. The strongest man remains powerless over the life of his affective elements, and can only restrain their expression.

Feelings, though little variable, often change their object. This is what leads us to believe them transformed.

In matters of feeling, illusion quickly creates certainty.

Feigned feelings sometimes end by becoming real ones.

The force of sentimental self-evidence lies in its taking no account of rational self-evidence.

The various forms of logic—mystical, sentimental, and rational—having no common measure, may be superimposed but not reconciled.

Feelings are combated with feelings, or with mental representations of feelings, never with reasons.

What one does out of pride is superior to what one accomplishes out of duty.

Sentimental and mystical impulses act far more upon the conduct of men than all rational demonstrations.

An idea deprived of affective or mystical support exerts no influence. It is a phantom without prestige, without endurance, and without force.

Affective, mystical, and collective influences are the great regulators of history.

To demonstrate that a thing is rational does not always prove that it is reasonable.

Man possesses only two absolute certainties: pleasure and pain. They orient his whole life, individual and social.

Religious and social codes have never been able to find any support for their prescriptions other than the attraction of pleasure and the fear of pain: punishments or rewards, paradise or hell.

The possible variations of sensibility being not very extensive, the limits of pleasure and pain are soon reached.

The frequent repetition of the same sensations engenders a physiological effect that might be called the law of weariness. It obliges sensitive beings to vary their desires often.

Believers acknowledge that the attraction of paradise would be less keen without the fear of hell.

Pleasure being fleeting and desire enduring, men are more easily led by desire than by pleasure.

Happiness is, above all, a hope that is attainable but not yet attained.

The man who, following the counsel of Buddhism, should slay desire within himself would lose all reason to act.

Desire establishes the scale of our values. The ideal of each nation is the synthesis of its desires.

The great handlers of men have always been creators of desires. Reformers do no more than substitute one desire for another.

Life would seem too long were it not devoted to pursuing chimerical joys and to regretting those one cannot attain.

The truly wise man would know how to master every impulse of his heart; but to be wise is not always to be happy.

The sight of misfortune is repugnant to happiness. Friendship scarcely endures between the happy man and the unhappy one.

Attraction and repulsion direct the evolution of worlds. Love and hatred, which are forms of them, direct the evolution of beings.

The true length of life depends not on the number of days, but on the diversity of sensations accumulated within those days.

Woman is too confined within the domain of the affective and the mystical to be much influenced by reasoning.

Intuition is often superior to reason. It enables women who reason badly to divine things not understood by men who reason very well.

Woman remaining more apt to feel than to reason, one does not improve her lot by compelling her to think too much.

According to the various orders of activity, woman is inferior or superior to man. She is rarely his equal.

In matters of art and of dress, women have only suggested tastes.

Woman does not forgive man for divining what she thinks through what she says.

To dominate or be dominated: for the feminine soul there is no other alternative.

The affective being ill-expressible in intellectual terms, to try to reason about love is necessarily to reason falsely.

Women would quickly lose their empire over man if they could acquire the faculty of being sincere.

Man scarcely believes woman except when she lies. He thus condemns her to lie often.

The habitual obstinacy of women and of diplomats in denying the evident is the chief cause of the skepticism their words inspire.

Women reproach men for not understanding them; but what beings of differing mentalities have ever understood one another?

In love, when one asks for words, it is because one is afraid to hear the thoughts.

Love raises us up or casts us down; it does not, therefore, allow us to remain ourselves.

Woman has as yet emerged too little from the domain of the instinctive not to prefer, to the highest glory, the most mediocre love.

Love fears doubt, and yet it grows through doubt and often perishes through certainty.

Moderate passions are the most enduring. One soon comes to be unable to bear one another when one begins by loving too much.

Love that has become clear-sighted is very near its end.

To seek to hold back a dying love is to claim to slow the passing of the days.

Our opinions often represent little beliefs in the process of formation, and consequently not yet stabilized.

An opinion may have affective, mystical, or rational origins. The rational origin is the rarest.

The opinions of the majority of men are founded not on arguments, but on hatreds, sympathies, or hopes.

The milieu creates our opinions. The passions and self-interest transform them.

Most men are incapable of forming a personal opinion, but the social group to which they belong furnishes them with ready-made ones.

Few beings know how to see things as they are. Some perceive only what they wish to see, others only what they are made to see.

It takes a very independent mind to create for oneself five or six personal opinions in the course of a lifetime.

If the least-founded opinions are generally the most tenacious, it is because they are supported by affective and mystical elements over which reason has no hold.

A book may modify the reader's opinions for a few moments, but his unconscious ideas soon regain their force.

Intolerance of opinions prevails over tolerance, because the former is of affective or mystical origin and the latter of rational origin.

To contest the value of an opinion of affective or mystical origin is to strengthen it.

Crowds do not create opinion, but they give it its force. A popular opinion quickly becomes contagious.

There are scarcely any newspapers today independent enough to allow their editors personal opinions.

The absence of critical spirit greatly favors the adoption of the general opinions necessary to the existence of a society. A people whose every unit was endowed with critical spirit would not long endure.

The force of a general opinion is irresistible. In creating it, one masters it; if one does not know how to create it, one must submit to it.

The affective, having no rational equivalent, is not expressible in intellectual terms. Words cannot, therefore, render feelings with exactness.

Behind certain words lies a world of ideas that those words can never reach.

The more a word is in general use, the more varied are the meanings it takes on according to the mentality of the men who employ it.

The incomprehension that dominates relations between beings of different races, social conditions, and sexes is irreducible, because the same words awaken in them dissimilar ideas. One may say, then, that in reality they do not speak the same language.

Words representing abstract ideas are not translatable with exactness into a foreign tongue. From one people to another, the same words correspond to different mental images.

The differing interpretation of the same words by beings of dissimilar mentality has been a frequent cause of historic struggles.

The art of governing includes the necessity of employing words that possess prestige. Their action is generally more effective than that of rational arguments.

The mystical content of certain formulas gives them a formidable magical power. Thousands of men have let themselves be killed for words they could not understand, and which were, moreover, devoid of rational sense.

In politics, things matter less than their names. To disguise the most absurd theories under well-chosen words is often enough to secure their acceptance.

Certain words, certain formulas, are powerful evokers of images, but their life is fleeting. They wear out and then lose the faculty of stirring emotion.

Words fixed by writing can change only slowly. Their meaning and the images they evoke, on the contrary, evolve rapidly. An ancient language can therefore represent only the ideas of former times.

In many men, speech precedes thought. They know what they think only after hearing what they say.

§ 1. Suggestion, repetition, and contagion.

A complete treatise on the art of persuasion might contain but five chapters: Affirmation, Repetition, Prestige, Suggestion, Contagion.

To persuade is not merely to convince, but to make one act.

Reasonings may convince, but they do not always make one act. Suggestion, repetition, and contagion, penetrating into the unconscious, tend on the contrary to be transformed into deeds.

Mental contagion is the surest agent for the propagation of opinions and beliefs. Political convictions are scarcely founded otherwise; one then tries to give them a rational aspect in order to justify them.

If collective observations are almost always erroneous, it is because they often represent the illusion of a single individual, transmitted by way of contagion.

Once an opinion has been fixed in the mind by suggestion or contagion, its absurdity no longer appears; reason cannot reach it; it dominates the will and the conduct.

Sufficiently repeated, the most disastrous theories end by becoming incorporated into the unconscious and turning into motives of action.

To obtain by suggestion is always worth more than to obtain by constraint.

The art of great leaders is to create, in those they carry along, new personalities.

To acquire a momentary authority, it is generally enough to persuade others that one possesses it.

One dominates peoples more easily by exciting their passions than by attending to their interests.

To act profoundly upon men, it is not their conscious soul that must be influenced, but their unconscious soul.

He who knows how to subdue or to charm has no need of discourse to persuade.

§ 2. Prestige.

To him who possesses prestige, force is useless.

Prestige can replace force, but force does not replace prestige.

Force compels obedience; prestige removes even the idea of disobedience.

No voluntary obedience without respect, no respect without prestige.

By filling the soul with wonder and respect, prestige paralyzes the critical faculties and renders suggestion easy.

An error haloed with prestige will always exert more influence than a truth without prestige.

Governments and peoples that lose their prestige have soon lost everything.

Pure races no longer exist save among primitive peoples. Among civilized peoples, the repetition of crossings and the identity of the milieu have ended by forming new historic races, analogous to pure ones.

The psychological characteristics of a historic race are as stable as its anatomical ones. They are transmitted by heredity with regularity and constancy.

The chance of conquest may bend several different peoples beneath a single domination. Centuries of crossings and identical conditions of existence are needed for them to acquire a national soul.

The history of a people is the record of its efforts to stabilize its soul and thus to emerge from barbarism.

The strength of a people lies less in the might of its armies than in the community of feeling engendered by the solidity of its national soul. The national soul of the Romans made them masters of the world. They vanished when they lost it.

Regressive evolution being always more rapid than ascending evolution, peoples take centuries to acquire a certain mental structure and sometimes lose it very quickly.

A civilized people represents a crowd whose soul has been stabilized by slow ancestral accumulations.

The stable soul of the race always tends to struggle against the unstable soul of the crowd and to limit its oscillations. Crowds make revolutions. The soul of the race restricts their duration.

Each historic race, and each phase in the life of that race, implies certain institutions, certain moralities, certain arts, certain philosophies, and implies no others. Never did a people adopt a foreign civilization without transforming it entirely.

To claim to impose our institutions, our customs, and our laws upon the natives of a colony is to seek to substitute for the past of one race the past of another.

Without rigidity, the ancestral soul possesses no permanence. Without a certain malleability, it could not adapt itself to the changes of milieu engendered by the evolution of civilization, and consequently could not progress.

Heredity alone can struggle against heredity. Crossings between unequal individuals disaggregate the ancestral soul of the race. Several nations perished for not having understood this.

Patriotism represents the synthesis of the aspirations of the national soul.

The half-breed is a man who wavers between the contrary impulses of ancestors differing in intelligence, in morality, and in character.

A people of half-breeds is ungovernable.

The past never dies. It lives within us and constitutes the surest guide to the conduct of individuals and of peoples. The soul of the living is made, above all, of the thought of the dead.

The dead are often terribly tyrannical.

To create ideas that will influence men is to put a little of oneself into the life of one's descendants.

Among men gathered into a crowd there forms a collective soul, very different from the individual soul of each of them.

The soul of crowds is dominated by a particular unconscious logic: collective logic.

The man who forms part of a multitude ceases to be himself. His conscious personality vanishes into the unconscious soul of the crowd. He loses all critical spirit, all aptitude for reasoning, and becomes once more a primitive. He has its heroisms, its enthusiasms, and its violences.

Excitability, sudden furies, incapacity for reasoning, boundless credulity, excessive intolerance, servile obedience to leaders—these constitute the principal characteristics of crowds.

Always intellectually below the isolated man, a crowd may be superior or inferior to him in the domain of feeling. It becomes as readily heroic as criminal.

The crowd is an amorphous being, incapable of willing and acting without a leader. Its soul seems bound to that of its leader.

Exaggerated in their feelings, crowds demand of their leaders the same exaggeration.

It is far easier to work suggestion upon a collectivity than upon an individual.

The sense of its power and its irresponsibility gives the crowd an excessive intolerance and pride.

The crowd is more susceptible to heroism than to morality.

The crowd must have a fetish: a personage, a doctrine, or a formula.

The extreme sensitivity of crowds renders their feelings very changeable. They pass easily from adoration to hatred.

The mysticism that saturates crowds leads them to attribute a mysterious power to the political formula, or to the hero who charms them.

Confined to the affective and the mystical, the crowd is incapable of seeing what the isolated observer would clearly perceive. A collective testimony is therefore most often erroneous.

The crowd retains of events scarcely anything but their marvelous side. Legends are more enduring than history.

Crowds demand above all things hopes. Deprived of the sense of the possible and endowed with infinite credulity, they accept the most improbable promises.

In crowds, feelings, emotions, and beliefs exert a contagious power against which no rational argument can prevail.

Affirmation, repetition, contagion, and prestige constitute the only effective means of persuading crowds.

An idea is accepted by crowds only when concretized into brief and violent formulas.

Altruism is a collective virtue. Personal interest, so influential over individuals, acts but little upon multitudes.

Always impressed by force, crowds are rarely so by kindness.

Crowds respect only the strong. Contempt for the weak has always been their law.

To liberty, crowds have generally preferred equality in servitude.

When the social restraints that contain the instincts of the multitudes are broken, they fall very quickly back into ancestral barbarism.

It is sometimes useful for a politician to invoke the wisdom, good sense, and moderation of the multitudes. To believe them endowed with such qualities renders one incapable of governing.

To yield once to the crowd is to give it consciousness of its strength and to condemn oneself to yield to it always.

The weight of number tends each day to be substituted for the weight of intelligence. But if number can destroy intelligence, it is incapable of replacing it.

Crowds rarely understand anything of the events they bring about.

Great assemblies possess the principal characteristics of crowds: mediocre intellectual level, excessive excitability, sudden furies, complete intolerance, servile obedience to leaders.

A heterogeneous crowd, formed of different individuals gathered at random, has but a transitory soul. A homogeneous crowd—political committees, professional groups, congregations, and the like—possesses a collective soul that the community of interests renders fairly fixed.

Although subject to the rules of collective psychology, a political assembly does not always act as a crowd, because the rival groups of which it is composed possess contrary interests and each has its own leaders.

The mediocre man increases his value by forming part of a group; the superior man diminishes his.

Certain violent leaders who possess prestige sometimes succeed in transforming all the groups of a gathering into a single crowd submissive to their will. The great revolutionary assemblies furnished several examples of this phenomenon.

The collective soul of assemblies often leads them to votes contrary to the individual wills of their members. The history of the Revolution is unintelligible without knowledge of this law.

One can act upon the individuals of a group only by first influencing the leaders of that group.

A brutal and daring minority will always lead a timid and irresolute majority.

Fear is one of the greatest motives of action in political assemblies. It is through excess of fear that they sometimes display a little courage.

The guiding principles capable of leading a people need not be numerous; it is enough that they be stable and universally respected.

The destiny of a people depends far more on its character than on its intelligence.

The ancestral soul of a people dominates its whole evolution. Political upheavals modify only the expression of that soul.

To keep the institutions of the past while transforming them imperceptibly is, for peoples, a great source of strength. The Romans of old, the English of our day, are almost the only ones who have known how to realize this ideal.

No people ever tried to break abruptly with its forefathers without profoundly disturbing the course of its history.

The formidable yoke of ancestors crushes the individual but fortifies society.

For a people, to have no past—as, for example, the United States—is at once a strength and a weakness.

A people could no more transmit its institutions to another than bequeath to it its soul.

The durable conquest of a people is not achieved with cannon, but through the establishment, between conqueror and conquered, of a certain community of feelings, of interests, and of thoughts.

A people is truly strong only if the classes that compose it possess many common interests. Individual egoism then acts in the same direction as collective egoism.

Political divergences among a people whose national soul is solidly constituted are quickly effaced before great collective interests.

The Latin nations weary more quickly of liberty than of servitude.

Peoples that have not known how to acquire an internal discipline are condemned to undergo an external one.

The elite of a people creates its progress; the average individuals make its strength.

In the life of a people, sustained effort alone is effective. Intermittent effort may create revolutions; it does not achieve durable progress.

A people whose population increases rapidly cannot remain pacifist. It ends by invading the neighbors whose population remains stationary.

Peoples remain always saturated with mysticism. Laws, institutions, and governments represent for them magical powers, capable of changing the course of things at will.

Among primitive peoples, man not being freed from collective influences, the soul of the individual differs little from that of his group.

An advanced civilization contains residues of all the stages successively traversed. The man of the caves and the barbarians of Attila's time have their representatives in it.

The barbarians of the future will not arise from without, but from that army of the unadapted whom civilizations, in progressing, leave behind them.

However mediocre a statesman may be, his faculties of judgment and foresight are superior to those of an assembly of diplomats. Through their grouping, the latter acquire the inferior mentality of crowds. The fate of peoples settled by congresses has always been wretched.

The civilization of a people is the outward garment of its soul, the visible expression of the invisible forces that lead it.

A civilization makes use of science, but is not built upon it.

A strong faith renders a people invincible, so long as it does not encounter before it a stronger faith.

By creating powerful social restraints, peoples emerge from barbarism; by breaking them, they return to it.

The progress of a people is determined neither by governments nor by revolutions, but by the sum of the efforts of the individuals who compose it.

Peoples, like living species, disappear when, too stabilized by a long past, they have become incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions of existence.

Men in society being unable to live without tyranny, the most acceptable is still that of the laws.

Peoples being governed by their mentality and not by the institutions imposed upon them, the laws must be the expression of that mentality. A law useful for one people often becomes harmful for another.

The laws have no need to concern themselves with rational logic. They are the daughters of necessities independent of that logic.

Laws should fix necessities and not passions. Those enacted under the sway of a passion are never durable.

Laws stabilize customs; they can rarely create them.

A law that does not simply sanction custom—that is, the experience of the past—does no more than codify our ignorance of the future.

Social necessities evolving more quickly than codes, jurisprudence must complete and modify the laws.

Political institutions do not create the feelings of a people. They are engendered by those feelings.

Institutions imposed by decree always disturb the play of the political factors that natural necessities would in the end bring into equilibrium.

To believe, as politicians do, in the transforming power of laws, is to forget that behind the visible phenomena there are always invisible forces that determine them.

If so many laws aggravate the ills they claimed to cure, it is because, in voting them, one was ignorant of their consequences.

A general law—that is, one not enacted against a party—may be despotic, but it is not arbitrary.

Individual tyranny is near at hand when collectivities withdraw themselves from the yoke of the laws.

A generalized offense soon becomes a right.

Laws, having only armed force for their support, cannot long endure.

One easily reshapes on paper the laws of a nation; one does not remake its soul.

Nature knows nothing of justice. Equity is a creation of man.

Right begins only from the moment when one holds the force necessary to make it respected.

As soon as one possesses force, one ceases to invoke justice.

Right and justice play no part in the relations between peoples of unequal strength.

One cannot oppose right to force, for force and right are one and the same. Right is force that endures.

Moral laws are not fictitious entities, but imperious necessities.

Morality represents the synthesis of the social needs of an epoch. By the sole fact that it wishes to endure, a society is obliged to have an irreducible criterion of good and evil.

No civilization being able to last without morality, codes will never accumulate too many severities to maintain the moral prescriptions.

Being the formula of the conditions of existence of a society at a given moment, morality evolves with those conditions.

In right, as in morality, certain necessities are not always truths, but it is useless to contest necessities.

Any morality which, under the influence of heredity, education, and codes, has not become unconscious and consequently instinctive, does not constitute a sure morality.

Moral rules have force only when there is no longer any merit in observing them.

A virtue practiced without effort is a quality, but not a virtue.

To wish, with many philosophers, to found morality upon pure reason is a dangerous illusion. A morality deprived of affective or mystical supports remains without endurance and without force.

Morality is learned only by practicing it. It belongs, like the arts, to that knowledge which books cannot teach.

The milieu and example are the two great generators of morality.

It sometimes takes centuries for a people to acquire a morality, and but a few years to lose it.

The morality of a people represents the scale of its values.

The lowest possible morality is that prescribed by the codes and maintained by the gendarmes. As soon as this minimum ceases to be respected, anarchy begins.

Above the indispensable morality maintained by the codes there exists a higher morality that teaches the sacrifice of individual interest to collective interest. A society can last with the first; it does not grow without the second.

It may be regarded as a grave symptom of decadence when the morality of the governing classes falls below that of the governed classes.

For want of an accepted code, international morality has never achieved any progress. It has remained that of a pack of wolves: to respect the strong, to devour the weak.

The same feeling may be called vice or virtue according to its social utility. Extended to the family, the tribe, the fatherland, individual egoism becomes a virtue. Vanity, an individual defect, is likewise a collective virtue.

Individual virtues sometimes become collective vices. Gentleness and the pardon of injuries, practiced by a people, would draw upon it a universal contempt.

Possible between individuals, tolerance is never so between collectivities.

Intolerance often represents, in the life of peoples, a virtue necessary to action.

To judge by its results, one could scarcely rank humanitarianism among the virtues. It is the most formidable enemy of morality. When humanitarianism grows, morality weakens.

The criminality of a country increases with the development of humanitarianism. By ceaselessly limiting repression, it reduces the inhibitive action of punishments.

To excuse evil is to multiply it.

In the moral domain, modern man destroys faster than he builds.

Virtue does not always drive one to action. Baser vices—hatred, vengeance, jealousy, love of plunder—have been the great motives of men's activity. These feelings keep Europe under arms.

Virtuous people often avenge themselves for the constraints they impose upon themselves by the boredom they inspire.

Disinterested action raises us in our own eyes and often gives more joy than egoistic acts.

The small, sustained heroisms are more difficult than the great, occasional ones.

The fear of the judgment of others is one of the surest supports of morality.

The more internal discipline, and consequently stable morality, a people possesses, the higher it stands in civilization.

Peoples disappear quickly from history when their morality begins to disintegrate.

An ideal always has affective and mystical supports. The rational elements superimposed upon it have never served to create it.

Revolutions and anarchy represent the ransom of that phenomenon, capital in the history of a people: a change of ideal.

One can do nothing with the man whose ideal, like that of the Russian revolutionaries, is to sacrifice his life for a belief.

No powerful people without a respected ideal. That ideal guides it, as a compass orients the course of a ship.

Peoples whose ideal is strong and whose needs are weak will always triumph over those whose needs are great and whose ideal is mediocre.

To destroy the ideal of an individual, a class, a people, is to take from it all that constituted its cohesion, its greatness, and its reasons for acting.

Being the synthesis of ancestral existence, the fatherland is an ideal whose cult has always constituted one of the strongest of social cements.

To devote long efforts to building up an ideal, then as many efforts to destroying it—such is the cycle of the life of a people.

One must not believe in the multiplicity of the gods. Under various names, the men of all ages have scarcely worshipped more than one divinity: Hope.

The attribution of a mysterious power to superior forces, made concrete in the form of idols, fetishes, and formulas, constitutes the mystical spirit. It dominates history.

Though man sometimes changes the names of his gods, he has never done without them. Mysticism seems an indestructible need of the mind.

Mystical logic can dominate affective logic to the point of annulling the instinct of self-preservation.

Heroes and Gods condense, into luminous syntheses, the obscure aspirations of peoples.

A religion renders the collective mentality of a people at a given moment of its history.

The gods themselves evolve. The dogmas fixed by texts remain unchanging, but according to peoples and to the times, the interpretation of those dogmas is transformed.

The religious spirit is independent of the dogmas that nourish it. The Jacobins of the Terror and the monks of the Inquisition possessed an identical mentality.

Incapable of living without certainty, man will always prefer the least defensible beliefs to the most justified negations.

If atheism were to spread, it would become a religion as intolerant as the old ones.

The intolerance of certain freethinkers frequently results from the unconscious religiosity with which atavism has filled their souls.

Free thought often constitutes no more than a belief that dispenses one from the fatigue of thinking.

It is always imprudent to try to reason one's faith.

By giving men the hope of a blessed eternity, religions have been far more useful to humanity than all the philosophies combined.

Religions constitute a force to be used; never to be combated.

If religious beliefs have delayed the knowledge of a few scientific truths, it is doubtful whether, in the lower phases of his evolution, man would have gained much from their discovery.

It is chiefly after having destroyed his gods that one discovers their usefulness.

Reason creates progress, but the builders of beliefs lead history. From the depths of their tombs, great visionaries such as Buddha and Mahomet still bend millions of men beneath the enchantment of their dreams.

Peoples rarely survive the death of their gods.

The birth of the arts has always preceded that of philosophy and the sciences. Being the offspring of affective and mystical needs, prior to the age of reason, they can flourish in ages of barbarism.

The arts, and music above all, are the language of the affective and the mystical; words, that of the rational.

The artist is mediocre when he reasons instead of feeling.

Art, deriving from the feelings, is accessible to intellectual interpretation only in its technical elements.

Like politics, art is guided by a few leaders, followed by a crowd of the led.

The beautiful is that which pleases us, and what pleases us is determined less by personal taste than by the sensibility of influential persons, whose mental contagion imposes their judgment.

There are no invariable aesthetic laws. Gothic monuments and the works of certain painters, greatly admired today, were long despised.

At certain epochs there seems to be created a veritable atmosphere of tastes and feelings, which imposes itself upon the most independent minds.

Mental contagion is so powerful in art that it gives to the works of an epoch a family resemblance, allowing one to recognize the moment of their creation.

Art undergoes the influence of milieu and of race to such a degree that there is not in history—despite certain appearances to the contrary—a single people that has adopted the arts of another without transforming them.

A great work of art is unconscious. Were it conscious, it would become personal and would no longer render the feelings and ideas of an epoch.

Evoking indistinct ideas accompanied by strong sensations, music acts easily upon beings of weak intelligence but keen sensibility. It has been said, with reason, that it is the art of women and of crowds.

Man, confined by nature within the ephemeral, dreams of eternity. In raising temples and statues, he gives himself the illusion of creating things that will not be seen to perish.

The true artist creates, even in copying.

Rites and symbols—ceremonies, flags, national festivals, worldly usages—dominate the individual will. They constitute the surest supports of religious and social life.

No place in a society for him who claims to free himself from rites and to despise symbols.

It is only under the influence of rites and symbols that individual beliefs take on a collective character.

Justice deprived of rites and symbols would no longer be justice.

A religious or political belief is founded upon faith, but without rites and symbols it could not endure.

The force of rites is such that they long survive the faith that gave them birth.

The most independent man, the most skeptical freethinker, voluntarily subject their existence to political, worldly, or social rites that deprive them of all real liberty.

Rites spare man uncertainty. Thanks to them, he knows, without reflection, what must be said and done in every circumstance.

The fundamental rites and symbols of a people are the creation of its dead.

Belief and knowledge constitute two modes of mental activity, of different origins.

Knowledge is always conscious and rational; belief, irrational and unconscious.

Belief has as its fundamental characteristic that it can be modified neither by observation, nor by reason, nor by experience.

The discovery of the most modest scientific knowledge demands an enormous labor; the acquisition of a belief demands none.

Knowledge spreads through books, beliefs through apostles.

Knowledge constitutes the great factor of the material progress of civilization. Beliefs orient ideas, feelings, and consequently conduct.

Knowledge establishes truths; belief embodies our desires; that is why man has always preferred belief to knowledge.

Religions give to the illusions born of our desires an appearance of reality. Science alone creates realities independent of those desires.

A political, religious, or social belief is an unconscious act of faith. By the time reasoning attempts to justify it, it is already formed.

The great force of beliefs is to give hopes and mental representations implying happiness.

One could not cite in history a single political or religious belief reduced by rational refutation. Reason always breaks against the wall of belief.

A belief is submitted to and not discussed. When it is discussed, it is because, already much shaken, it is near to vanishing.

One meets with difficulty a man willing to risk his life for a rational truth. One easily finds ten thousand ready to be killed for a belief.

The men of each age live upon a small number of political, religious, and social beliefs, which time alone, or the acquisition of a new belief, can transform.

To create a belief is to create a new consciousness, generative of a new conduct.

The slightest change in the beliefs of a people modifies its destiny.

When a question raises violently contradictory opinions, one may be sure that it belongs to the cycle of belief and not to that of knowledge.

In political persecutions of an anti-religious kind, it is not reason that rises against a belief, but two contrary beliefs that find themselves in conflict.

Divergences of rational origin are easily borne; antagonisms of belief are not tolerated. Religious or political struggles will always be violent.

Intolerance is the necessary companion of strong convictions. Between the adherents of neighboring beliefs it is far more pronounced than between the defenders of dogmas without kinship.

It is chiefly in the domain of beliefs that the human mind seeks certainties.

The hypothesis is a belief often taken for a piece of knowledge.

The phenomena that occur in the field of belief not being scientifically verifiable, the credulity of the learned man may there equal that of the ignorant.

Things rationally contradictory are perfectly reconciled in the mind hypnotized by a belief.

A belief being neither rational nor voluntary, none of the absurdities it teaches can harm its propagation.

Not to believe things possible is to render them impossible. One of the forces of faith is to be ignorant of the impossible.

A strong belief creates strong wills, which weak wills can never resist.

Man has always had need of beliefs to orient his thought and guide his conduct. Neither philosophy nor science has hitherto been able to replace them.

Beliefs have called forth from nothingness works of art that no rational thought could ever have brought forth.

Despite their slight rational value, beliefs lead peoples. They keep them from being a dust of barbarians, without cohesion and without force.

Education is the art of making the conscious pass into the unconscious.

Well educated, the unconscious is our slave and works for us. Ill educated, it becomes our master and acts against us.

The worth of a man is measured, not—as the masters of our university believe—by the level of his instruction, but by that of his character.

Strength of character, and not instruction, gives man a resistant internal framework. Deprived of this framework, he becomes the plaything of every circumstance.

One of the gravest of Latin errors is to believe in the parallelism of instruction, morality, and intelligence.

To instruct is not to educate. Instruction enriches the memory. Education creates in man useful reflexes and teaches him to master harmful ones.

A few years suffice to instruct a barbarian. It sometimes takes centuries to educate him.

To develop in man reflection, judgment, energy, and coolness would be far more necessary than to impose upon him the insipid phraseology that constitutes scholastic teaching.

To confine the mind within the artificial and render it incapable of observation is the surest result of methods that show the world only through books.

Science elevates or debases, according to the mental ground that receives it. Higher culture is usable only by superior brains.

Too high an instruction, imposed upon beings of inferior mentality, distorts all their judgments. Half rationalized, they lose the intuitive qualities of the primitive and become intellectual half-breeds.

The experiments, repeated upon thousands of natives of the colonies, show how greatly an ill-adapted instruction debases the intelligence, the morality, and the character.

Nothing is more dangerous than general ideas cut off from their roots. They always lead to over-simplification and to misunderstanding.

Great efforts are needed at first to establish useful habits in the unconscious, but once fixed they allow one to guide oneself without effort.

Channeled by a good method, the feeblest intelligence succeeds in progressing.

To acquire a method is to possess the art of economizing time and, in consequence, of prolonging its duration.

To wish to teach too many things prevents the pupil from learning any. This fundamental principle is entirely unrecognized by our University.

The educator ought to know how to determine the aptitudes of each pupil that can be usefully developed. When chance alone determines the choice of studies and of careers, the yield of the man is mediocre.

One of the great illusions of democracy is to imagine that instruction equalizes men. It often serves only to differentiate them further.

Mnemonic competitions create social inequalities more profound than those of the old regime, and often less justified.

Our classical system of education has ended by creating an aristocracy of memory, having no relation to that of judgment and intelligence.

Instruction may be mnemonic or experimental. The first forms fine talkers, the second men of action.

Preserved almost exclusively by the Latin peoples, mnemonic instruction is one of the great causes of their weakness. Its result is to entrust the most important social functions to individuals often quite mediocre.

The choice of a system of education is of more importance to a people than that of its government.

The strength of a nation is measured not by the number of its population, but by the worth of its elites.

Created by the elites, civilizations progress only through them. Deprived of its elites, a country would soon fall into misery and anarchy.

The people is the great reservoir of a country's energy, but this energy is usable only when channeled by an elite.

Inventions of genius are always personal. They come to flower in becoming collective.

Men of the elite gathered into a group no longer constitute an elite. To keep its level, the superior mind must remain solitary.

Aristocracies have taken various forms: birth, talent, or fortune. The world has never done without them.

The intellectual aristocracy ought to appear as little equitable to the egalitarian crowds as the old nobility. Birth alone, in fact, confers intellectual qualities, as of old it conferred privileges.

The struggle of the blind multitudes against the elites on whom they live is one of the continuities of history. The triumph of number has marked the end of several civilizations.

The great civilizations were able to prosper only by knowing how to dominate their inferior elements.

The elite creates; the plebs destroys.

Reason is far more constructive than explanatory. It has changed the face of the world, but it has said nothing yet of the secret powers that make a blade of grass evolve.

The logic of the universe differs too greatly from our own for us to hope to penetrate its secrets.

If one called a miracle everything that is incomprehensible, the life of any being whatever would have to be regarded as a perpetual miracle.

The mysterious forces that make beings come to birth, grow, and die are so remote from our reason that science today renounces explaining them.

The least living cell carries within it an immense past and a mysterious future.

Is the world created or uncreated, real or unreal, the human species enduring or ephemeral? Philosophy, which once answered these questions, now renounces resolving them.

Certain formidable problems—whence come we? whither go we?—ought not to be too much discussed, so as to leave them a cloud of doubt that does not efface all hope.

Of the three possible conceptions of life—optimistic, pessimistic, resigned—the last is perhaps the wisest, but also the least generative of action.

To rebel or to adapt oneself: there is scarcely any other choice in life.

By taking eternity from matter, science has destroyed one of the last idols of philosophy.

The real philosophy of the world is made alongside the philosophers and outside of them.

Philosophical systems may disappear, but there will always remain a philosophical way of regarding phenomena.

The last word of philosophy is to understand that one cannot yet understand.

Every phenomenon has its mystery. Mystery is the unknown soul of things.

Science is in reality a revolt of man against nature, an effort to escape the blind forces that oppress him.

The subjections imposed upon man by nature once constituted inexorable fatalities. In learning to break down those fatalities, science divests them more and more of the character of necessities.

Determinism and fatalism are very different things. To discover the determinism of a phenomenon often makes its fatality disappear.

The harmony supposed to be pre-established in the universe is doubtless due only to the inevitable equilibrium of the forces that compose it.

The most precise scientific laws are valid only for a limited portion of time and of space.

Each science derives from a small number of principles. That of the invariability of mass sustains the whole edifice of chemistry. Upon that of the conservation of energy rest physics and mechanics.

The two great constants of the universe are resistance and motion. The first is constituted by inertia, the second by energy.

The various forms of energy, as well as the phenomena of life, result from disturbances of equilibrium, most often constituted by differences of level.

In the observation of phenomena, science advances rapidly. In their explanation, it has long remained stationary.

The terrain of science is sure, but it represents only an islet lost in the boundless ocean of unknown things.

Scientific progress does no more than push back into the infinite the barriers that separate us from the inaccessible.

Materialism claimed to substitute itself for the religions, but today matter has become as mysterious as the gods it was to replace.

The precision of scientific formulas often conceals the uncertainty of the principles.

One of the learned man's superiorities over the ignorant is to sense where mystery begins.

As soon as a scientific theory attains fixity, it retards all progress.

Science creates more mysteries than it clears up.

[1] The propositions that follow were quite new when I formulated them for the first time. They represent the results of experimental researches, pursued for nearly ten years, and set forth in eighteen memoirs which my two works, The Evolution of Matter and The Evolution of Forces, summarize. I broke off these researches on the day when they became too costly, and resigned myself to returning to psychological studies.

Matter, once supposed indestructible, slowly vanishes through the continual dissociation of the atoms that compose it.

Certain products of the dematerialization of matter constitute, by their properties, intermediaries between ponderable bodies and the imponderable ether—worlds hitherto profoundly separated by science.

Matter, once regarded as inert and able only to restore an energy previously supplied to it, is on the contrary a colossal reservoir of energy—intra-atomic energy—capable of being spontaneously expended.

It is from intra-atomic energy, liberated during the dissociation of matter, that most of the forces of the universe result, notably electricity and solar heat.

Force and matter are two aspects of one and the same thing. Matter represents a relatively stable form of intra-atomic energy. Heat, light, electricity, and so forth, represent unstable forms of the same energy.

To dissociate atoms—or, in other terms, to dematerialize matter—is simply to transmute the stable form of energy called matter into those unstable forms known by the names of electricity, light, heat, and the like.

The equilibria of the colossal forces condensed within the atoms give them a very great stability. It is enough, however, to disturb these equilibria by an appropriate reagent for the disaggregation of the atoms to begin. It is thus that certain luminous rays easily dissociate the superficial parts of any body whatever.

Light, electricity, and most of the known forces resulting from the dematerialization of matter, a body in radiating loses, by the very fact of that radiation, a part of its mass. Could it radiate all its energy, it would vanish entirely into the ether.

Matter is transmuted into various forms of energy, but it was doubtless only at the origin of things that energy could condense in the form of matter.

The law of evolution, applicable to living beings, applies equally to the simple bodies. The chemical species, no more than the living species, are invariable.

The need of certainty has always been stronger than the need of truth.

The practical value of a truth is measured by the degree of belief it inspires.

The appearances of certainty exert upon souls as much influence as true certainties.

Sometimes little exacting in the choice of his truths, man always ill endures having them attacked.

Affective logic and mystical logic serve not to discover realities, but to conceal those one dreads.

To clothe error in a seductive form is often enough to make it accepted as truth.

Truths once formulated sometimes take a long time to be transformed into accepted truths.

It harms the discovery of truth to appraise it, as the pragmatists do, according to its degree of utility.

Truth is neither an entity, nor a convenience, nor a utility, but a necessity.

Before science, man knew scarcely anything but subjective truths; the role of the learned was to create impersonal truths.

In our universe, things are linked together but are not fixed.

There is no more a definitive truth for man than there is a definitive being for nature.

A truth, like a living organism, is explicable only through the knowledge of its earlier states.

Beings and things are ceaselessly modified. To the realities that flow away correspond truths that follow the same course.

A truth is a provisional stage upon a road that has no end.

There are absolute truths within time, but not within eternity.

The centuries end by transforming most of our truths into errors.

Truths change their aspect according to the mentalities that receive them.

Presented in mathematical form, error acquires great prestige. The most hardened skeptic readily attributes mysterious virtues to equations.

Many men easily dispense with truths; none is strong enough to dispense with illusions.

An illusion held to be true acts like a reality.

To lose an illusion is not always to acquire a certainty.

It is in pursuing illusions that man has often achieved progress he was not seeking.

In becoming collective, an individual illusion acquires the force of a truth.

Error has perhaps rendered more services to the world than truth.

History unfolds outside of reason and often even against all reason.

Many events remain misunderstood so long as one supposes them to have rational causes.

A historian has not to concern himself with the rational quality of beliefs, but only with the degree of domination they have exercised over souls.

The mental life of each generation deriving from the preceding ones, the fabric of future history is in part woven by the present.

Legend is generally truer than history. The former renders the real feelings of peoples. The latter recounts events distorted by the mentality of their narrators.

It is possible to write history only if, being attached to no party, one is freed from the passions that are the soul of parties.

Psychological conflicts lead history. The great upheavals derive far more from struggles of belief than from oppositions of interest.

History has almost always been dominated by the mystical and the affective, and rarely by the rational. The Unreal has been the true motor of the world.

Intelligence makes one think. Belief makes one act.

Had man begun by thinking instead of acting, the cycle of his history would long since have closed.

Illusory or real, certainties are generative of action. Man deprived of certainties would be like a vessel without a rudder, a machine without a motor.

The absurd and the impossible have never prevented a sufficiently strong belief from making one act.

Action alone reveals the nature of our intelligence and the worth of our character.

To reflect is useful, but to act without too much reflection is sometimes necessary. The great heroisms are generally due to men who have reflected little.

Thoughts, like all the phenomena of life, result from unstable equilibria, ceaselessly in course of transformation.

Books rarely make general ideas evolve. They confine themselves most often to recording their transformations.

Our acts carry within them a train of necessary consequences. We name fatality the logical linking of those consequences.

To know what one ought to do is not at all to know what one will do.

Democracy, which believes itself of rational origin, in reality draws its strength from affective and mystical elements independent of reason.

The word democracy corresponds, among the popular classes and among the lettered, to very different ideas.

Dominated by the need of equality, popular democracy rejects fraternity between classes and shows no concern for liberty. The democracy of the intellectuals, on the contrary, is eager for liberty and cares very little for equality.

The true democrat is a collective being, having no individuality other than that of his group.

Contrary to democratic ideas, psychology teaches that the collective entity called the People is far inferior to the isolated man.

The successive encroachments of the working class recall those of the nobility and the clergy, against which the old kings had so much trouble to struggle.

The hatred of despotism and the love of liberty were always proclaimed among peoples who bear despotism very well and liberty very ill.

Democratic principles are among those ideas readily imposed upon others, but rarely accepted for oneself.

The more the laws proclaim equality, the more there develops the need for the outward signs of inequality.

The democratic need to make a show is the most costly and the least profitable of needs.

The thirst for equality is often only an avowable form of the desire to have inferiors and no superiors.

The artificial notion of equality has given birth to the hatred of all the superiorities that constitute the greatness of a country.

Democracies will come to replace the intermittent wars between peoples with continual struggles between classes.

Nature knows nothing of equality. It has achieved its progress only through increasing inequalities.

Far from tending toward the equalization of men, civilization differentiates them more each day.

By attributing to it imaginary powers, democracy has ended by making of science a false god.

Socialism, the ultimate form of the principle of equality, is a state of mind far more than a doctrine.

Democracy and socialism are, despite appearances, separated by profound abysses.

Socialism, which preaches the leveling of conditions, is in evident opposition to the democracy of the intellectuals, which claims to make the most capable triumph.

The vagueness of socialist doctrines is an element of their success. It is important for a dogma to make itself precise only after having triumphed.

The progress of socialism is due chiefly to the fact that it is a form of Statism, the ideal of all political parties in France.

The harshness of certain capitalists and the feebleness of their morality create many adepts for socialism.

When the State claims to protect the citizens too much, they lose the habit of protecting themselves and consequently all initiative.

Beliefs that imply no disillusionment place their paradise in inaccessible regions. The weakness of socialism is to situate its own here below.

The paltry happiness, the equality in servitude, that socialism promises is not an ideal strong enough to fire peoples for long.

By the mere fact of their progress, modern civilizations create a growing mass of the unadapted, always ready to struggle against them. They form the majority of socialists.

Wealth, once built upon the immobilization of capital, depends today on the rapidity of its circulation, and consequently on the intelligence that handles it.

Socialism would be a universal servitude. Syndicalism would also be a servitude, but, limited to the interests of each professional group, it would allow the individual to defend himself against the despotism of the State.

Most of the progress of the human mind is due to certain factors—individual initiative, risk, competition, and the like—that socialism would like to destroy.

To substitute collective initiative and responsibility for individual initiative and responsibility is to bring man very low on the scale of human values.

Certain social groupings represent an absorption of the individual soul into the collective soul, and consequently a return to inferior phases of evolution.

It is by escaping from the equality of the earliest ages, to which socialism wishes to bring us back, that man was able to raise himself from savagery to civilization.

To live is to struggle. Struggle is a universal law. Non-combative beings would have achieved no progress.

Had nature not been pitiless toward the weak, the world would be peopled with monsters, and no civilization could have come to flower.

Peoples possessing many cannon alone have the right and the power to be pacifist.

A meticulous preparation, a strong faith, a very keen hatred of the enemy, will always be the great elements of success in battles.

To recoil before an effort one believes useless is to renounce all success in advance.

An army composed of individuals who argue would be easily vanquished by an army of barbarians, incapable of reasoning but ready to obey without discussion.

To fear being vanquished increases the chances of being so. To persuade an army of its superiority doubles its courage and its chances of victory.

Individual courage is far rarer than collective courage.

Friendships between individuals may have only sympathy for their motive. Alliances between collectivities have solely material interests for their basis, and vanish when those interests disappear.

The economic interests of peoples make them wish for peace, but the divergences of feelings and beliefs always drive them to war.

A truly pacifist people would quickly disappear from history.

The only durable revolutions are those of thought.

Scientific revolutions derive solely from rational elements; political and religious revolutions from affective, mystical, and collective elements.

Scientific revolutions transform social life far more profoundly than political revolutions.

Often rational at its outset, a political revolution propagates itself only through affective, collective, and mystical influences foreign to all reason.

Revolutions, like wars, represent the externalization of conflicts between psychological forces.

A revolution is not always a phenomenon that ends, followed by another that begins, but a continuous phenomenon that has accelerated its evolution.

A people too conservative is fatally doomed to violent revolutions. Incapable of evolving, it is obliged to transform itself abruptly.

The truly unhappy being is the one whom you persuade that his condition is wretched. Thus do leaders proceed to make revolutions.

The leaders of revolutions always believe themselves guided by reason. They obey in reality affective, mystical, and collective forces that they do not suspect.

Mental contagion is the most powerful factor in the propagation of a revolutionary movement.

The multitude is the outcome of a revolution, but does not constitute its point of departure.

Ideas, leaders, army, and crowd are the fundamental elements of revolutions.

Every popular revolution that succeeds is a momentary return to barbarism. It constitutes the triumph of the instinctive over the rational, the rejection of the social constraints that distinguish the civilized man from the barbarian.

Revolutions cannot destroy a mental structure built up by a long past. They scarcely change anything but facades.

Revolutions have generally, for their immediate result, only a displacement of servitude.

The great social reforms are not the work of revolutions. They are wrought, like geological upheavals, through a slow accumulation of small causes.

The majority of men ask to be led and not to revolt.

Rarely does a people understand anything of the revolutions accomplished with its aid.

When a people finally understands why it underwent a revolution, that revolution is generally long since over.

A monarch is easily overthrown, but the principles he represented survive his fall. Most revolutions are followed by restorations.

As soon as the army of a country begins to disintegrate, a revolution is near. The monarchy perished in France on the day when undisciplined troops refused to defend their king.

In certain men, the revolutionary spirit is a state of mind, independent of the object upon which it is exercised. No concession, therefore, could appease it.

Revolutions that begin result most often from beliefs that are ending.

What is called popular government is, in reality, a little oligarchy of leaders.

The great illusion of politicians is to regard the people as a kind of infallible divinity, having no account to render for its acts.

To guide oneself according to opinions that are false but popular is a condition of existence of all democratic governments.

Outbidding, humanitarianism, and fear were always the great factors in the conduct of democratic governments.

A popular government is dominated by too many passions to remain equitable and tolerant. It maintains itself only by becoming more and more despotic.

Limited by the fear of responsibilities, individual despotism is less oppressive than a collective despotism, which is always irresponsible.

An individual tyranny is easily overthrown. Against a collective tyranny the oppressed are powerless.

What one detests in a tyranny is not always the tyranny itself, but the individuals who exercise it.

The hardest tyrannies are easily accepted as soon as they become anonymous.

No popular government is possible without the preponderance of the Jacobin mentality.

A narrow mind, strong passions, intense mysticism, incapacity to reason soundly—these are the principal components of the Jacobin soul.

The Jacobin is not a rationalist, but a believer. Far from building his belief upon reason, he strives to mold reason upon his belief.

From the political point of view, certain peoples divide into Jacobins, who understand nothing of the influences of the past, and conservatives, who perceive nothing of the necessities of the present.

A policy of group is always of an inferior order. Popular governments can have no other.

If economic necessities did not restrain the passionate wills of popular governments, they would destroy themselves by their own hands.

The first phase in the evolution of a triumphant democracy is to destroy the old aristocracies; the second, to create new ones.

The crimes of kings are as nothing beside the crimes of peoples.

The modern State has inherited, in the eyes of the multitudes, the mystical power attributed to kings when they incarnated the divine will.

In popular governments, the phantom of fear plays a preponderant role. Fear of the army, of the Church, of the workers, of the officials, has dictated, these twenty years, most of our laws.

In a democratic government whose ministers change rapidly, the real power belongs to the administrations. Each minister believes he governs them; he is in reality governed by them.

The more a government weakens, the more the power of the administrative caste grows.

A people quickly falls into anarchy when sovereignty passes from the law to the multitude.

The instability of popular governments alone limits their tyranny. The parties in conflict succeeding one another rapidly in power, the despotism of each is necessarily ephemeral.

When democracies do not transform themselves into military dictatorships, they end in plutocracy, a very oppressive form of despotism.

The true political regime of a people is revealed neither by its constitution nor by its laws. It is discovered only by seeking out the respective extent of the role of the State and of the citizens in public and private affairs.

Democratic governments regard the closing of the churches as less harmful than that of the taverns. They will surely discover one day that the closing of the churches is more dangerous.

A people that ceaselessly demands equality is very near to accepting servitude.

Modern political problems may be compared to those of the sphinx of ancient legend. They must be solved, or one is devoured.

Without the knowledge of the psychology of races, of peoples, of individuals, and of crowds, politics could not be understood.

A society is an aggregate of contrary forces, which must be kept in equilibrium. With the rupture of that equilibrium, anarchy begins.

The whole of politics reduces to these two rules: to know and to foresee.

A government is not the creator of an epoch, but its creation.

Physical atoms, living cells, human units, remain a vain dust so long as directing forces do not channel their actions.

The true power of a government lies less in its force than in the voluntary submission of those who obey it.

Individual tyranny and collective tyranny are the only forms of government discovered since the origin of history. The second was always the harsher.

The consequences of political measures being impossible to foresee, the mania for great reforms is very dangerous for a people.

A political event does not germinate spontaneously. It is the flowering of a whole series of anterior causes.

To judge an event inevitable is to make of it a fatality.

In politics as in life, success generally belongs to the convinced and rarely to the skeptical.

As soon as a class is no longer sure of its rights—the nobility of old, the bourgeoisie of our day—it soon loses them.

In political life, as in individual life, the preoccupations that are formulated are far less important than those that are not.

To displace a tyranny is not to create a liberty.

The danger of autocracy lies not in the autocrat, but in the thousands of individuals who share his power and each exercise it like a petty despot.

The confusion of powers always follows the confusion of minds.

Like religious beliefs, political ideas ought to be judged not by their rational value, but by the action they exert.

Many political errors derive from ideas theoretically rational.

In politics, it is less dangerous to lack guiding ideas than to have false ones.

Governments perish far more by their own faults than by the attacks of their enemies.

The despotism of the living would sometimes be without limit were it not contained by the despotism of the dead.

There is no possible society without a principle of authority, just as there is no river without banks to contain it.

The surest means of destroying the principle of authority is to speak to everyone of his rights and never of his duties. All men are ready to exercise the former; very few concern themselves with the latter.

One does not govern a people by taking account only of its material needs, but also of its dreams.

Moral powers are combated neither with laws nor with armies.

To handle men, one must not forget that their affective self and their intellectual self have no parallel evolution and scarcely influence one another.

To use the affective and mystical impulses of peoples as a means of action, while striving to give them a rational orientation, is one of the secrets of the art of governing.

A new idea needs supports to make itself accepted. Having become strong, it serves as a support.

One must never share the passions of the men one directs, but one must know them.

Impossible to govern a people if one forgets that beliefs, judged absurd by reason, are sometimes more powerful than demonstrated truths.

It is very dangerous to have faith for an enemy. A government that persecutes a religious belief exposes itself to perish by that belief.

Even placing oneself only at the point of view of pure utility, a government ought to avoid persecutions. They are always more useful to the persecuted doctrines than to their persecutors.

The role of the learned man is to destroy chimeras; that of the statesman, to make use of them.

When a government asks to follow opinion instead of orienting it, it ceases to be the master.

A power that is disputed is soon no longer a power respected.

A responsibility divided into fragments quickly becomes irresponsibility.

To govern exclusively for the profit of a class is to increase indefinitely the demands of that class, and to condemn oneself soon to have it for an enemy.

One of the elements of the art of governing consists in winning over the leaders of the majorities, or in setting others against them.

Leaders are combated only with leaders.

One can easily disaggregate the transitory soul of a crowd; one remains powerless against the permanent soul of a race.

To temporize in order to have time to prepare oneself, as Machiavelli counseled, is very wise. To temporize in order to leave to chance the task of arranging events is very dangerous.

Discontent was always the generator of effort; the man too content with his lot pursues no progress.

A government ought to raise moral barriers before they become indispensable. At the moment when they become so, it is too late to build them.

As soon as one perceives the necessity of yielding, one must not wait for the moment when it will be impossible not to yield.

Humanitarianism and fear are among the factors of the dissociation of peoples. These feelings are without excuse in him who claims to govern.

Always to yield to threats and violence is to give birth in the popular soul to the idea that it suffices to threaten, and if need be to pillage, in order to be obeyed.

Concessions do not prevent battles that have become necessary. They render them more costly and more hard.

An energetic, momentary repression is far more effective than a feeble and continual one.

Terror is a useful psychological procedure only on condition that it does not last.

A government that ceaselessly makes pacts with the riot perishes by the riot.

When one cannot govern a people with true ideas, one must resign oneself to governing it with ideas held to be true.

The great social currents cannot be stemmed. Wisdom consists in deflecting them slowly.

The superior man knows how to use fatality, as the sailor uses the wind, whatever its direction.

Every visible event has behind it invisible forces that determine it. He who cannot discover them is ignorant of the art of governing.

A policy that takes account only of the present hour is always of an inferior order.

Good sense and character are often more useful than genius to a statesman.

A society does not endure without fixed thoughts; the individual does not progress without mobile ones.

The future being always laden with the past, in order to foresee—that is, to see ahead—one must first look behind.

To foresee is useful; to forestall is more so. To foresee eliminates the surprises of the future. To forestall prevents their action.

A statesman without foresight is a creator of disastrous fatalities.