Maximilien Robespierre Quotes
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Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.
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The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.
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The king must die so that the country can live.
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You will follow us soon! Your house will be beaten down and salt sown in the place where it stood!
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Crime butchers innocence to secure a throne, and innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime.
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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.
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To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.
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Atheism is aristocratic; the idea of a great Being that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is altogether popular.
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lf the attribute of popular government in peace is virtue, the attribute of popular government in revolution is at one and the same time virtue and terror, virtue without which terror is fatal, terror without which virtue is impotent. The terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue.
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The most extravagant idea that can be born in the head of a political thinker is to believe that it suffices for people to enter, weapons in hand, among a foreign people and expect to have its laws and constitution embraced. No one loves armed missionaries; the first lesson of nature and prudence is to repulse them as enemies.
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The general will rules in society as the private will governs each separate individual.
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Citizens, did you want a revolution without revolution?
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The aim of constitutional government is to preserve the Republic; that of revolutionary government is to lay its foundation.
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By sealing our work with our blood, we may see at least the bright dawn of universal happiness.
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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.
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Any institution which does not suppose the people good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil.
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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.
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Death is not 'an eternal sleep!' Citizens! efface from the tomb that motto, graven by sacrilegious hands, which spreads over all nature a funereal crape, takes from oppressed innocence its support, and affronts the beneficent dispensation of death! Inscribe rather thereon these words: 'Death is the commencement of immortality!'
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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.
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The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.