Alain Finkielkraut quotes

Each man is contained and constrained, on entering social life, to fit his own life in, just as he fits his words and thoughts into a language that was formed without and before him and which is impervious to his power. Entering the game, as it were, whether of belonging to a nation or of using a language, a man enters arrangements which it does not fall to him to determine, but only to learn and respect the rules. (Alain Finkielkraut)

For the traditionalists the Enlightenment boiled down to a fatal misunderstanding. All philosophes had been wrong about the nature and also, if one could put it that way, about the sex of prejudice. They had mistaken an earth mother who sustained and inspired her children for a bogeyman of a father. Then, seeking to overthrow this father, they had in reality done away with the mother-figure.

Alain Finkielkraut

DeMaistre and Bonald ... wanted to teach men submission, to give them the religion of established power, to substitute, in Bonald's phrase, "the evidence of authority for the authority of evidence.”.

Alain Finkielkraut