“ A nation achieves and retains pre-eminence as long as it accepts conventions which are necessarily clumsy, as long as it is given over to prejudices without regarding them as such. Once it calls them by their name, everything is unmasked, everything is compromised.
To seek to rule, to take a role, to make the law—such things cannot be done without a powerful dose of stupidity ”
 Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born (1973). copy citation