French Revolution Quotes

• The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.

  

  Albert Camus
  • Poet
  • Artists
  • Journalist

• Adolf is a swine. He will give us all away. He only associates with reactionaries now. His old friends aren't good enough for him. Getting matey with the East Prussian generals. They're his cronies now. Adolf is turning into a gentleman. He's got himself a tail-coat now. Adolf knows exactly what I want. I've told him often enough. Not a second edition of the old imperial army. Are we revolutionaries or aren't we? Allons, enfants de la patrie! If we are, then something new must arise out of our élan, like the mass armies of the French Revolution. If we're not, then we'll go to the dogs. We've got to produce something new, don't you see? A new discipline. A new principle of organization. The generals are a lot of old fogeys. They never had a new idea.

  

  Ernst Rohm
  • Gentleman
  • Dogs
  • Old Friends

• Justice has its anger, my lord Bishop, and the wrath of justice is an element of progress. Whatever else may be said of it, the French Revolution was the greatest step forward by mankind since the coming of Christ. It was unfinished, I agree, but still it was sublime. It released the untapped springs of society; it softened hearts, appeased, tranquilized, enlightened, and set flowing through the world the tides of civilization. It was good. The French Revolution was the anointing of humanity.

  

  Victor Hugo
  • Society
  • Justice
  • Christ

• 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
  • Happy
  • Agreement
  • French Revolution

• 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
  • Christian
  • Modernity
  • Rootless

• 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
  • Human Power
  • Avalanche
  • French Revolution

• In the history and literature courses I took, epistemological questions came to interest me most. What makes one explanation of the French Revolution better than another? What makes one interpretation of "Waiting for Godot" better than another? These questions led me to philosophy and then to philosophy of science.

  

  Elliott Sober
  • History
  • Science
  • Literature