The new rebel in our time is a skeptic and will not entirely trust anything, and therefore he has no loyalty and he can’t even be a revolutionary.

The fact that he doubts everything, and he must doubt everything, bars his way when he wants to denounce anything.

For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine, and you can’t believe in a moral doctrine if all things are meaningless.

The modern revolutionary doubts not only the institutions that he denounces, but the doctrine of moral truth by which he denounces it.

As a politician he will cry out that war is a waste of life, yet as a philosopher he has to admit that all life is a waste of time.

A Russian philosopher denounces a policeman for killing a peasant and then in his other writings proves that by the highest philosophical theory that the peasant should have killed himself.

A scientist goes to a political meeting where he complains that we are treating native peoples as beasts, and then he goes to a scientific meeting where he proves that we are beasts.

In short, the modern revolutionary, being an infinite skeptic, which he must be, is always engaged in undermining his own mind.

In his books on politics he attacks persons for trampling on morality, but in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on persons.

Therefore the modern rebel has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt by rebelling against everything, he has lost his right to rebel against anything…

There is a kind of thought that stops thought, and that is the only kind of thought that ought to be stopped.