16 Quotes by Raymond Aron

Europeans would like to escape from their history, a "great" history written in letters of blood. But others, by the hundreds of millions, are taking it up for the first time, or coming back to it.

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

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

Political thought in France is either nostalgic or Utopian.

Peace is impossible, war is improbable.

Skepticism cannot be revolutionary, even though it speaks the language of revolution.

Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.

In writing if it takes over 30 minutes to write the first two paragraphs select another subject.

In a way, all sociologists are akin to Marxists because of their inclination to settle everyone's accounts but their own.