The devil pales beside the man who owns a truth, his truth. We are unfair to a Nero, a Tiberius: it was not they who invented the concept heretic: they were only degenerate dreamers who happened to be entertained by massacres. The real criminals are men who establish an orthodoxy on the religious or political level, men who distinguish between the faithful and the schismatic.
CIORAN, A Short History of Decay (1949)
“In later Buddhism, especially in the Madyamika school, emphasis is placed on the radical opposition between real truth or paramartha, attribute of the delivered, and ordinary truth or samvriti, ‘veiled’ truth or more exactly ‘truth of error’, privilege or curse of the nonliberated. […] Our only choice is between irrespirable truths and salutary frauds. The truths that allow of no existence alone deserve the name of truths. Superior to the exigencies of the living, they do not condescend to be our accomplices. They are ‘inhuman’ truths, truths of vertigo, and we reject them because no one can do without props disguised as slogans or as gods.”
CIORAN, Drawn & Quartered (1979)
In this extended interview, Gabriel Gatehouse speaks to Russian thinker and idealogue Aleksandr Dugin about ‘truth’, a new Cold War, and media control.
Newsnight is the BBC’s flagship news and current affairs TV programme – with analysis, debate, exclusives, and robust interviews.
Portal E.M. Cioran Brasil 🇧🇷 