Top 100 Quotes About French Revolution
#1. More men and women were slaughtered in a couple of weeks of the terror of the atheistic French Revolution than in a century of the Inquisition.
Michael Coren
#2. Iris Johansen's lovers weathered the sack of city states and the vagaries of the French Revolution; Judith McNaught's heroines endured amnesia, social ostracism and misunderstandings so big they deserved their own ZIP code.
Lauren Willig
#3. Had you but seen it, I promise you, your high-minded principles would have melted like candle wax. Never would you have wished such beauty away.
Jennifer Donnelly
#4. It took us a long time to get rid of the effects of the French Revolution 200 years ago. We don't want another one.
Margaret Thatcher
#5. The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today not by the dead hand of tradition but by modernity itself, and they can be salvaged only by moving beyond it.
Harvey Cox
#6. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.
Octavio Paz
#7. When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.
Hilary Mantel
#8. In 1800, in the first interparty contest, the Federalists warned that presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson, because of his sympathy expressed at the outset of the French Revolution, was 'the son of a half-breed Indian squaw' who would put opponents under the guillotine.
Robert Dallek
#9. In France you cannot not have lunch. If you stopped the French from having lunch, you will have a second revolution, I can tell you this. Not going to work - it is part of the French privilege.
Christian Louboutin
#10. A tempest ceases, a cyclone passes over, a wind dies down, a broken mast can be replaced, a leak can be stopped, a fire extinguished, but what will become of this enormous brute of bronze?
Victor Hugo
#11. Abroad? Oh no. I went to England in '91, and you stood in the garden at Fontenay and berated me." He shook his head. "This is my nation. Here I stay. A man can't carry his country on the soles of his shoes.
Hilary Mantel
#12. God knows," Charpentier said, "I like the present scheme of things very little, but I dread to think what will happen if the conduct of reform falls into hands like yours."
"Reform?" Camille said. "I'm not talking about reform. The city will explode this summer.
Hilary Mantel
#13. In this new hall the factions regroup in their old places. Legendre the butcher bawls out a Brissotin: "I'll slaughter you!" "First," says the deputy, "have a decree passed to say that I am an ox.
Hilary Mantel
#14. The Allies had made war on Napoleon as a tyrant and an oppressor of nations; yet once they had got him out of the way, they did him the favor of representing him as the torchbearer of the French Revolution. They did him the further favor of repeating his mistakes and besting him at them.
J. Christopher Herold
#15. What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.
Bernardo Bertolucci
#16. Ninety-three was the war of Europe against France, and of France against Paris. And what was the Revolution? It was the victory of France over Europe, and of Paris over France. Hence the immensity of that terrible moment?, '93, greater than all the rest of the century
Victor Hugo
#17. But just as everything was going along politely, quietly and wonderfully - in poured Citizen Danton and his crew.
Hilary Mantel
#18. The Robespierre women (as one tended to think of them now) were all on display. Madame looked actively, rather intimidatingly benevolent; it was her aim in life to find a Jacobin who was hungry, then to go into the kitchen and make extravagant efforts, and say, "I have fed a patriot!".
Hilary Mantel
#19. Most of the Ten Commandments are negative. The purpose of law is not to mandate good behavior. That concept comes from the French Revolution.
Randall Terry
#20. The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848.
C.L.R. James
#21. No secular state ever existed and none would exist until the end of the French Revolution, and so we understand that America was built on the Judeo-Christian ethic and we believe that this nominee is going to see to it that those truths are upheld.
Rod Parsley
#22. Europeans are forever the offspring of Machiavelli, trapped in a historical rollercoaster that can bring us a monarchy-toppling French Revolution and then a few years later Napoleon Bonaparte as emperor.
Loretta Napoleoni
#23. Democracy, thus French revolution, was not invented by philosophic theory nor by the bourgeois leadership. It was discovered by the masses in their method of action.
Raya Dunayevskaya
#24. Vadier (on Danton): "We'll clean up the rest of them, and leave that great stuffed turbot till the end."
Danton (on Vadier): "Vadier? I'll eat his brains and use his skull to shit in.
Hilary Mantel
#25. The 1789 Revolution had given the French a political script of unequalled drama. For the better part of the following century the temptation to reenact the play was irresistible.
Niall Ferguson
#26. The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system
Eric Hobsbawm
#27. A revolution in itself is not a blessing. The revolution accomplished by the French people is, indeed, a wonderful event - the most striking, in my opinion, in history; but it may lead to events which will make it a mighty evil.
John C. Calhoun
#28. You would save them. If you could."
"No. There are periods in revolution when to live is a crime, and people must know how to yield their heads if they are demanded. Perhaps mine will be. If that time comes, I won't dispute it.
Hilary Mantel
#29. This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.
Edvard Munch
#30. Camille, a few feet away, looked like a gypsy who had mislaid his violin and had been searching for it in a hedgerow; he frustrated daily the best efforts of an expensive tailor, wearing his clothes as a subtle comment on the collapsing social order.
Hilary Mantel
#31. All men now allow that if any human power could have stemmed the avalanche of the French Revolution, it would have been the reforms of Turgot.
Evelyn Beatrice Hall
#32. A pottery outside Paris was turning out his picture on thick glazed crockery in a strident yellow and blue. This is what happens when you become a public figure; people eat their dinners off you.
Hilary Mantel
#33. The revolutionaries failed to institute the novel forms of social and political organization they hankered after; Workers would not accept a ten-day week, or state-appointed priests, or rectangular departements, or the cult of the Supreme Being.
Alan Ryan
#34. They (the French) have taken genius instead of reason for their guide, adopted experiment instead of experience, and wander in the dark because they prefer lightning to light.
Gouverneur Morris
#35. Little by little, the old world crumbled, and not once did the king imagine that some of the pieces might fall on him.
Jennifer Donnelly
#36. Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.
Maximilien De Robespierre
#37. God knows what risks we take, God knows all that Danton has done. God and Camille. God will keep his mouth shut.
Hilary Mantel
#38. People said - though this felt like a heresy - that they had seen Camille make Robespierre laugh.
Hilary Mantel
#39. It [August 10th 1792] was the bloodiest day of the Revolution so far, but also one of the most decisive.
William Doyle
#40. In a few days, I will have them all guillotined in Paris.
Jean-Paul Marat
#41. My History of the Jesuits is in four volumes ... This society has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, or Napoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally.
John Adams
#42. 92, '93, '94. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death.
Hilary Mantel
#43. The nation-state became powerful in the wake of the French Revolution, whereas the nation-state has become powerless in light of globalization.
Grace Lee Boggs
#44. I'd heard him tell a woman who complained he never helped her achieve orgasm, that she should treasure the memory of her last orgasm, since it probably predated the French Revolution.
Andre Aciman
#45. I can't divide Camille's loyalties. Who knows? He might make the wrong choice.
Hilary Mantel
#46. The scientific and societal achievements of the modern age are undisputable. But after the French Revolution, modernity increasingly emancipated itself from Christian roots, thereby becoming rootless itself.
Walter Kasper
#47. We have been expropriated from our own language by television, from our songs by reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornography, from our city by the police and from our friends by wage-labor.
The Invisible Committee
#48. The main thing is, the constraints have come off style. What we are saying now is that the Revolution does not proceed in a pitiless, forward direction, its politics and its language becoming ever more gross and simplistic: the Revolution is always flexible, subtle, elegant.
Hilary Mantel
#49. A sensibility that wails almost exclusively over the enemies of liberty seems suspect to me. Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.
Maximilien De Robespierre
#50. Ask Robespierre. Ask the man with the conscience which is more important, your friend or your country - ask him how he weighs an individual in the scheme of things. Ask him which comes first, his old pals or his new principles. You ask him, Camille.
Hilary Mantel
#51. We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.
Vladimir Lenin
#52. America thrives on identity politics, left and right. But France is opposed to the idea. Since the Revolution, the French have enthroned the idea of universalism. All of us must be equal before the law as abstract individuals, and that extends to the arts.
Edmund White
#54. I do no damage. This is damage, this."
He picked up a paper from Camille's desk. "I can't read your writing, but I take it the general tenor is that Brissot should go and hang himself.
Hilary Mantel
#55. The French Revolution printed money because they didn't have any, so they just printed it, and this was a revolutionary step which of course we are still reaping the huge consequences of today. It struck me that this was beginning to happen ... there had been scandals where shares had been printed.
Marina Warner
#56. The French Revolution was nothing but a precursor of another revolution, one that will be bigger, more solemn, and which will be the last.
Francois-Noel Babeuf
#57. The annals of the French Revolution prove that the knowledge of the few cannot counteract the ignorance of the many ... The light of philosophy, when it is confined to a small minority, points out the possessors as the victims rather than the illuminators of the multitude.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#58. At the English Revolution, when William of Orange came to the throne, the introduction of French wines into the country was prohibited, and this gave a great impetus to the manufacture of cyder and care in the production of cyder of the best description.
Sabine Baring-Gould
#59. The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.
Pankaj Mishra
#60. The French Revolution will be found to have had great influence on the strength of parties, and on the subsequent political transactions of the United States.
John Marshall
#61. Robespierre has never forgiven his friends the injuries he has done them, nor the kindnesses he has received from them, nor the talents some of them possess that he doesn't.
Hilary Mantel
#62. The French revolution was a .eune invented and constructed for the purpose of manufacturing liberty; but it had neither lever cogs, nor adjusting powers, and the consequences were that it worked so rapidly that it destroyed its own inventors, and set itself on fire.
Charles Caleb Colton
#63. Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.
Hilary Mantel
#64. The French revolution, he concluded, had not produced any new principles of truths, merely a mass of examples of how things could go wrong.
Mike Jay
#65. Madame Tallien shared honors with Josephine Beauharnais in being mistress to Barras, an ex-nobleman and ex-terrorist whose appetite for beautiful women, beautiful young men, and money was the only wholesome trait in his character.
J. Christopher Herold
#66. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.
Oscar Wilde
#67. The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.
John Corigliano
#68. There were two, three or four French Revolutions. Like a multi-stage rocket today, the Revolution involved several successive explosions and propellant thrusts.
Fernand Braudel
#69. I mean, already in the French Revolution, the harpsichord becomes identified with the aristocracy, with the ancien regime. Plus, hey, you know, I mean, harpsichord is a really easy target, isn't it? I mean, it's - it's just how it is.
Mahan Esfahani
#70. Napoleon had been fighting this army of slaves and free people in Haiti and it depleted his forces. And after the Revolution, when the French were driven out, they stopped and sold this big chunk of North America to the Americans for very little money.
Edwidge Danticat
#71. But France's powerful armies, and a very large number of fortresses, ensure that the French Sovereign will possess the throne forever, and they do not have anything to fear now concerning internal wars or their neighbors invading France.
Frederick The Great
#72. If you look back at the history of creativity in clothes - the French Revolution, the First World War and the Second World War - they have all been creative reinventions, the moment new forms of luxury come into play.
Christian Lacroix
#73. I am no one's agent. I am the agent of the law. All the conspiracies pass through my hands. The Committee, you know, draws its present unity from being conspired against. I do not know what would happen if the policy of believing in conspiracies were changed.
Hilary Mantel
#74. The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.
C.L.R. James
#75. He was guillotined in the French Revolution, and he said he'd keep blinking his eyes after his head was off, for as long as he had consciousness. He blinked seventeen times. That's a scientist, Gill said.
Jo Walton
#76. I tell you, dear Citizen Camille - it's not the deaths I can't stand. It's the judgements, the judgements in the courtroom.
Hilary Mantel
#77. We should say to the West: "You have been supporting dictators for too many years. Don't expect the people to introduce democracy over night. It is going to take time." It took time with the French revolution, it took time with the Eastern European revolutions. And it is going to take time there.
Tariq Ramadan
#78. I turn away from the smell of death, pressing my lavender scented handkerchief as tight as I can against my nose.
Meghan Masterson
#79. Tea, late dinners and the French Revolution. I cannot exactly see the connection of ideas.
Thomas Love Peacock
#80. This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it.
H.G.Wells
#81. At first they'd thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there are problems of scale.
Hilary Mantel
#82. The consequences of things are not always proportionate to the apparent magnitude of those events that have produced them. Thus the American Revolution, from which little was expected, produced much; but the French Revolution, from which much was expected, produced little.
Charles Caleb Colton
#83. There is death in the folds of her skirt and blood about her feet. She is for no man.
Joseph Conrad
#84. Edmund Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. Any society, he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which destroys the fabric of its state, must soon be "disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality".
Tony Judt
#85. CAMILLE DESMOULINS: For the establishment of liberty and the safety of the nation, one day of anarchy will do more than ten years of National Assemblies.
Hilary Mantel
#86. Who goes there?" At the same time, the click of guns, as they were lowered into position, was heard. Enjolras replied in a haughty and vibrating tone: - "The French Revolution!
Victor Hugo
#87. It was 1953, and I was still at school. I'd borrowed a silent French film from the library for my 9.5mm projector. It was by Jean Epstein, and it was awful. So I rang the library and asked if they had anything else. They said they had 'Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution.'
Kevin Brownlow
#88. To say my day was not going well, would be like saying the French Revolution had been a bit troublesome for Marie Antoinette.
Nichole Chase
#89. The "terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.
Edward Abbey
#90. Laclos thought, how about a one-way ticket to Pennsylvania? You'd enjoy life among the Quakers. Alternatively, how about a nice dip in the Seine?
Hilary Mantel
#91. Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.
William S. Burroughs
#92. Justice has its anger, Monsieur Bishop, and the wrath of justice is an element of progress. No matter what they say, the French Revolution is the greatest advance taken by mankind since the coming of Christ.
Victor Hugo
#93. The situation is like this: they hired our parents to destroy this world, and now they'd like to put us to work rebuilding it, and
to add insult to injury
at a profit.
The Invisible Committee
#94. Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death; - the last, much the easiest to bestow, O Guillotine!
Charles Dickens
#95. Since the French Revolution Englishmen are all intermeasurable one by another, certainly a happy state of agreement to which I forone do not agree.
William Blake
#96. I returned to London in the spring of 1926 for the General Strike. It was the topic of Paris. The French, exultant as always at the discomfiture of their former friends, and transposing into their own precise terms our mistier notions from across the Channel, foretold revolution and civil
Evelyn Waugh
#97. After the French Revolution, it was not the treason of the king that was in question; it was the existence of the king. You have to be very careful when you judge and execute somebody for being a symbol.
Adam Michnik
#98. A little man in a threadbare coat spoke up for the poor as if he really knew what he was talking about. The women with the flowers threw them down for him. "That's Robert Speer," one said. "Something like that. He's our man.
Marge Piercy
#99. In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry.
Bertrand Russell
#100. Davy's work in Bristol came under attack by conservative politicians, including the famous Irish MP Edmund Burke, who accused the gas experiments of promoting not only atheism but the French Revolution.
Mark Kurlansky
