Daily Inspiration Quote by Emile M. Cioran

Crime, for Cioran, is not a glitch in the political order; it is one of its most reliable adhesives. “In full glory” is the tell. He’s not talking about petty theft or private vice, but crime made public, theatrical, even ceremonial: violence that doesn’t merely happen but announces itself. The phrase drips with anti-romantic irony. Glory is supposed to crown heroism; Cioran pins it to brutality and dares you to notice how often the crowd applauds anyway.

The mechanism is “sacred fear,” a chilling fusion of religion and policing. Fear becomes “sacred” when it’s no longer experienced as a temporary emotion but as a moral atmosphere, a reverence for force. That’s how authority stabilizes itself: not by persuading citizens of its legitimacy, but by training them to treat power as fate. The subtext is that people don’t just submit under terror; they internalize it, even defend it, because fear offers clarity. It simplifies the world into protectors and threats, permits and punishments.

Context matters: Cioran wrote in the long shadow of Europe’s 20th-century catastrophes, having seen how regimes and movements weaponize spectacle - purges, show trials, street violence - to manufacture obedience. The most corrosive idea here is that crime can be politically productive. When violence is framed as necessary, cleansing, or historically mandated, it stops reading as transgression and starts reading as governance. Cioran’s cynicism lands because it refuses the comforting story that authority is consolidated by virtue; it’s consolidated by the rituals of dread.