A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice.

Cioran treats quotation as a morally charged act rather than a neutral scholarly convenience. To “garble” a quotation—whether by truncation, mistranslation, or tendentious paraphrase—is, in his view, to violate the integrity of another mind’s expression. The strong triad “betrayal, insult, prejudice” suggests three harms at once: betrayal of the original author’s intent, insult to the text’s dignity (and to readers’ intelligence), and prejudice in the sense of bias introduced by distortion. The remark also reflects Cioran’s broader suspicion of secondhand ideas: once words are detached from their exact form and context, they become tools for polemic and self-justification rather than vehicles of truth.