Top 61 Quotes About Robespierre
#1. Robespierre, crippled and blind, has yet to be healed to the knowledge that service - his desire - is a deed of savage-speaking gentleness, not soft-spoken savagery.
Tanith Lee
#2. Neither Rousseau nor Robespierre was capable of dreaming of a goodness beyond virtue, just as they were unable to imagine that radical evil would 'partake nothing of the sordid or sensual' (Melville), that there could be wickedness beyond vice.
Hannah Arendt
#3. And Robespierre, the Incorruptible, who loved us so much he cut off our heads so we would not be troubled by too many thoughts.
Jennifer Donnelly
#4. Death is the beginning of Immortality. - MAXIMILIEN ROBESPIERRE
Kami Garcia
#5. In a Balkan country, not so many years ago, a party which had been beaten by a narrow margin in a general election retrieved its fortunes by shooting a sufficient number of the representatives of the other side to give it a majority ... Cromwell and Robespierre ... acted likewise..
Bertrand Russell
#6. - The myths are dead. The gods are dead. The ghosts and ghouls and phantoms are dead. There is only the State, and the People.
- No, Monsieur Robespierre. There is much more than that.
Neil Gaiman
#8. 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
#9. who went on to write one of Louis XVI and a good synography of Robespierre. They
John Hardman
#10. You [Robespierre] will follow us soon. Your house will be beaten down and salt sown in the place where it stood.
Georges Danton
#11. 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
#12. An individualism which has got beyond the stage of hedonism tends to yield to the lure of the grandiose. It was not man, the individual, nor even the Supreme Being, that Robespierre set up against Christ; it was that Leviathan, the Nation.
Andre Malraux
#13. I have left my balls to Robespierre and my legs to Couthon. That should help the Committee of Public Safety for a while.
Georges Danton
#14. DANTON: Could you indeed? It's you idealists who make the best tyrants.
ROBESPIERRE: It seems a bit late to be having this conversation. I've had to take up violence now, and so much else. We should have discussed it last year.
Hilary Mantel
#15. Like a child in new boots leaping from puddle to puddle, this view sees history as leapfrogging from one bloodbath to the next, from World War One to World War Two to the Cold War, from the Armenian genocide to the Jewish genocide to the Rwandan genocide, from Robespierre to Lenin to Hitler.
Yuval Noah Harari
#16. The prose," Robespierre said. "It's so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style.
Hilary Mantel
#17. 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
#18. This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it.
Hilary Mantel
#19. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free. Once more a humanistic utopianism ends in tyranny, whether in Rousseau's writing or in the Reign of Terror which carried his position to its conclusion. Robespierre,
Francis A. Schaeffer
#20. My only regret is that I'm going before that rat, Robespierre! [to his executioner] Don't forget to show my head to the people; it's well worth seeing.
Georges Danton
#21. The neoconservative pseudo-conservatives speak like Tocqueville but act like Robespierre.
Ilana Mercer
#22. The idea of a specifically Robespierrist terror was a myth, invented by the Termidoreans, the men who overthrew Robespierre, who themselves were very much implicated in the recourse to terror.
Marisa Linton
#23. Robespierre, however, was not the type of leader finally destined to emerge from the Revolution.
Irving Babbitt
#24. People said - though this felt like a heresy - that they had seen Camille make Robespierre laugh.
Hilary Mantel
#25. It is with regret that I pronounce the fatal truth: Louis ought to perish rather than a hundred thousand virtuous citizens; Louis must die that the country may live
Maximilien Robespierre
#26. The aim of constitutional government is to preserve the Republic; that of revolutionary government is to lay its foundation.
Maximilien Robespierre
#27. Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.
Maximilien Robespierre
#29. And what did it matter that Brutus had killed a tyrant? Tyranny still existed in every heart and Rome only existed in Brutus.
Robespierre
#32. Virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue.
Maximilien De Robespierre
#33. We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with it; now in this situation, the first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people's enemies by terror.
Maximilien Robespierre
#34. The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.
Maximilien De Robespierre
#39. Again, it may be said, that to love justice and equality the people need no great effort of virtue; it is sufficient that they love themselves.
Maximilien Robespierre
#40. Our revolution has made me feel the full force of the axiom that history is fiction and I am convinced that chance and intrigue have produced more heroes than genius and virtue.
Maximilien De Robespierre
#42. The revolutionary government owes to the good citizen all the protection of the nation; it owes nothing to the Enemies of the People but death.
Maximilien De Robespierre
#43. Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.
Maximilien Robespierre
#45. By sealing our work with our blood, we may see at least the bright dawn of universal happiness.
Maximilien Robespierre
#46. A nation is truly corrupted when having ... lost its character and it's liberty, it passes from democracy to aristocracy or to monarchy. That is the decrepitude and death of the body politic ...
Maximilien De Robespierre
#47. Any institution which does not suppose the people good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil.
Maximilien Robespierre
#48. Food that is necessary for man's existence is as sacred as life itself. Everything that is indispensable for its preservation is the common property of society as a whole. It is only the surplus that is private property and can be safely left to individual commercial enterprise.
Maximilien Robespierre
#50. Crime butchers innocence to secure a throne, and innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime.
Maximilien Robespierre
#52. The revolution is the war of liberty against its enemies. The constitution is the rule of liberty against its enemies. The constitution is the rule of liberty when victorious and peaceable.
Maximilien Robespierre
#53. There are only two parties in France: the people and its enemies. We must exterminate those miserable villains who are eternally conspiring against the rights of man ... We must exterminate all our enemies.
Maximilien De Robespierre
#56. 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
#58. 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
#60. Atheism is aristocratic; the idea of a great Being that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is altogether popular.
Maximilien Robespierre
#61. Is it to be thought unreasonable that the people, in atonement for wrongs of a century, demand the vengeance of a single day?
Maximilien Robespierre
