Jose Gasset Quotes (15 Quotes)

Civilization is nothing more than the effort to reduce the use of force to the last resort.

I am I plus my surroundings and if I do not preserve the latter, I do not preserve myself.

Contrary to the unsophisticated suggestions of melodrama, to rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as of the firm seat

Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.

Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.

This leads us to note down in our psychological chart of the mass-man of today two fundamental traits the free expansion of his vital desires, and, therefore, of his personality and his radical ingratitude towards all that has made possible the ease of his existence. These traits together make up the well-known psychology of the spoilt child.

Civilization is nothing else than the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort

I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.

Revolution is not the uprising against preexisting order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one

Liberalism -- it is well to recall this today -- is the supreme form of generosity it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence it is the noblest cry that has ever resounded in this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy more than that, with an enemy which is weak.

A Don Juan is not a man who loves women, but a man that women love.

A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.

The mass believes that it has the right to impose and to give force of law to notions born in the cafe.

By speaking, by thinking, we undertake to clarify things, and that forces us to exacerbate them, dislocate them, schematize them. Every concept is in itself an exaggeration.

The cynic, a parasite of civilization, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.