What passes for optimism is most often the effect of an intellectual error.
Political thought in France is either nostalgic or Utopian.
In a way, all sociologists are akin to Marxists because of their inclination to settle everyone's accounts but their own.
Intellectuals cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute, for a universally comprehensive scheme.
Racism is the snobbery of the poor.
The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinion merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The revolution provides him with his opium.