Maximilien Robespierre Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

Any institution which does not suppose the people good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil.

Maximilien Robespierre
The general will rules in society as the private will governs each separate individual.

Maximilien Robespierre
Any law which violates the inalienable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.

Maximilien Robespierre
The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.

Maximilien Robespierre
I am no courtier, nor moderator, nor Tribune, nor defender of the people: I am myself the people.

Maximilien Robespierre
It is with regret that I pronounce the fatal truth: Louis must die that the country may live.

Maximilien Robespierre
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 Robespierre
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 Robespierre
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!"

Maximilien Robespierre
Citizens, would you want a revolution without revolution?

Maximilien Robespierre
By sealing our work with our blood, we may see at least the bright dawn of universal happiness.

Maximilien Robespierre
If 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.

Maximilien Robespierre
The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.

Maximilien Robespierre
Wickedness is the root of despotism as virtue is the essence of the Republic.

Maximilien Robespierre
Citizens, did you want a revolution without revolution?

Maximilien Robespierre
A man of high principle will be ready to sacrifice to the state his wealth, his life, his very nature—everything, indeed, except his honour.

Maximilien Robespierre
The aim of constitutional government is to preserve the Republic; that of revolutionary government is to lay its foundation.

Maximilien Robespierre
Avoid the ancient insanity of governments: the mania of wishing to govern too much.

Maximilien Robespierre
Terror is nothing other than prompt, stern, inflexible justice; terror thus issues from virtue; it is less a particular maxim than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to the most pressing needs of the fatherland.

Maximilien Robespierre
Intimidation without virtue is disastrous; virtue without intimidation is powerless.

Maximilien Robespierre