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French Revolution Quotes

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French Revolution Quotes

“Villain Foulon taken, my sister! Old Foulon taken, my mother! Miscreant Foulon taken, my daughter! Then, a score of others ran into the midst of these, beating their breasts, tearing their hair, and screaming, Foulon alive! Foulon who told the starving people they might eat grass! Foulon who told my old father that he might eat grass, when I had no bread to give him! Foulon who told my baby it might suck grass, when these breasts were dry with want! O mother of God, this Foulon! O Heaven our suffering! Hear me, my dead baby and my withered father: I swear on my knees, on these stones, to avenge you on Foulon! Husbands, and brothers, and young men, Give us the blood of Foulon, Give us the head of Foulon, Give us the heart of Foulon, Give us the body and soul of Foulon, Rend Foulon to pieces, and dig him into the ground, that grass may grow from him!”

PovertyRevengeFamineFrench Revolution
Book:a tale of two cities
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“The tears gathered and stood without overflowing the red sockets. Ah! if I were rich still, if I had kept my money, if I had not given all to them, they would be with me now; they would fawn on me and cover my cheeks with their kisses! I should be living in a great mansion; I should have grand apartments and servants and a fire in my room; and they would be about me all in tears, and their husbands and their children. I should have had all that; now--I have nothing. Money brings everything to you; even your daughters. My money. Oh! where is my money? If I had plenty of money to leave behind me, they would nurse me and tend me; I should hear their voices, I should see their faces. Ah, God! who knows? They both of them have hearts of stone. I loved them too much; it was not likely that they should love me. A father ought always to be rich; he ought to keep his children well in hand, like unruly horses. I have gone down on my knees to them. Wretches! this is the crowning act that brings the last ten years to a proper close. If you but knew how much they made of me just after they were married. (Oh! this is cruel torture!) I had just given them each eight hundred thousand francs; they were bound to be civil to me after that, and their husbands too were civil. I used to go to their houses: it was 'My kind father' here, 'My dear father' there. There was always a place for me at their tables. I used to dine with their husbands now and then, and they were very respectful to me. I was still worth something, they thought. How should they know? I had not said anything about my affairs. It is worth while to be civil to a man who has given his daughters eight hundred thousand francs apiece; and they showed me every attention then--but it was all for my money. Grand people are not great. I found that out by experience! I went to the theatre with them in their carriage; I might stay as long as I cared to stay at their evening parties. In fact, they acknowledged me their father; publicly they owned that they were my daughters. But I was always a shrewd one, you see, and nothing was lost upon me. Everything went straight to the mark and pierced my heart. I saw quite well that it was all sham and pretence, but there is no help for such things as these. I felt less at my ease at their dinner-table than I did downstairs here. I had nothing to say for myself. So these grand folks would ask in my son-in-law's ear, 'Who may that gentleman be?'-- 'The father-in-law with the money bags; he is very rich.'--'The devil, he is!' they would say, and look again at me with the respect due to my money. Well, if I was in the way sometimes, I paid dearly for my mistakes. And besides, who is perfect? (My head is one sore!) Dear Monsieur Eugene, I am suffering so now, that a man might die of the pain; but it is nothing to be compared with the pain I endured when Anastasie made me feel, for the first time, that I had said something stupid. She looked at me, and that glance of hers opened all my veins. I used to want to know everything, to be learned; and one thing I did learn thoroughly --I knew that I was not wanted here on earth.”

LoveFatherWealthGratitudeFatherhoodAbandonmentFrench RevolutionDowryDisapointment
Book:Père Goriot
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“The Enlightenment project was doomed from the start, though, for though human beings run out of money, time, resources, energy, and desire, they never run out of the past. A war on the past will necessarily be endless, for no sooner has a man conquered the past than the very act of conquering becomes the past, as well.”

ArtBeautyConservatismGood TasteFrench Revolution
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“The matter on which I judge people is their willingness, or ability, to handle contradiction. Thus Paine was better than Burke when it came to the principle of the French revolution, but Burke did and said magnificent things when it came to Ireland, India and America. One of them was in some ways a revolutionary conservative and the other was a conservative revolutionary. It's important to try and contain multitudes. One of my influences was Dr Israel Shahak, a tremendously brave Israeli humanist who had no faith in collectivist change but took a Spinozist line on the importance of individuals. Gore Vidal's admirers, of whom I used to be one and to some extent remain one, hardly notice that his essential critique of America is based on Lindbergh and 'America First'—the most conservative position available. The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has—from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.”

PoliticsUnited StatesInfluenceRevolutionIndiaHumanismIsraelContradictionIndividualismIrelandConservatismCollectivismFrench RevolutionPartisanshipRadicalismFree ThoughtThomas PaineSpinozismEdmund BurkeGore VidalAmerica First CommitteeCharles LindberghIsrael Shahak
Book:Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
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“Talking to Robespierre, one tried to make the right noises; but what is right, these days? Address yourself to the militant, and you find a pacifist giving you a reproachful look. Address yourself to the idealist, and you’ll find that you’ve fallen into the company of a cheerful, breezy professional politician. Address yourself to means, and you’ll be told to think of ends: to ends, and you’ll be told to think of means. Make an assumption, and you will find it overturned; offer yesterday’s conviction, and today you’ll find it shredded. What did Mirabeau complain of? He believes everything he says. Presumably there was some layer of Robespierre, some deep stratum, where all the contradictions were resolved.”

CharacterFrench Revolution
Book:A Place of Greater Safety
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“But just let the masters of the world -- princes, kings, emperors, powerful majesties, invincible conquerors -- let them only try to make the people dance on a certain day each year in a set place. This is not much to ask, but I dare swear that they will not succeed, whereas, if the humblest missionary comes to such a spot, he will make himself obeyed two thousand years after his death. Every year the people meet together around a rustic church in the name of St. John, St. Martin, St. Benedict, and so on; they come filled with boisterous yet innocent cheerfulness; religion sanctifies this joy and the joy embellishes religion: they forget their sorrows; at night, they think of the pleasure to come on the same day next year, and this date is stamped on their memory. By the side of this picture put that of the French leaders who have been vested with every power by a shameful Revolution and yet cannot organize a simple fete.”

ReasonChristianityLeadersPoliticiansFrench RevolutionMaistre
Author:Joseph de Maistre
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“All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.”

PhilosophyViolenceSocietyRevolutionAuthorityFrench Revolution
Book:St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence
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“The seal of Reason, made impregnable: _ The seal of Truth, immeasurably splendid: The seal of Brotherhood, man's miracle: _ The seal of Peace, and Wisdom heaven-descended: The seal of Bitterness, cast down to Hell: _ The seal of Love, secure, not-to-be-rended: The seventh seal, Equality: that, broken, God sets His thunder and earthquake for a token.”

ApocalypseFrench Revolution1899Napoleon IiiSeven Seals
Book:The Works of Aleister Crowley: With Portraits (Collected Works of Aleister Crowley) VOLUME 2
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“The defenders retreated, but in good order. A musket flamed and a ball shattered a marine’s collar bone, spinning him around. The soldiers screamed terrible battle-cries as they began their grim job of clearing the defenders off the parapet with quick professional close-quarter work. Gamble trod on a fallen ramrod and his boots crunched on burnt wadding. The French reached steps and began descending into the bastion. 'Bayonets!' Powell bellowed. 'I want bayonets!' 'Charge the bastards!' Gamble screamed, blinking another man's blood from his eyes. There was no drum to beat the order, but the marines and seamen surged forward. 'Tirez!' The French had been waiting, and their muskets jerked a handful of attackers backwards. Their officer, dressed in a patched brown coat, was horrified to see the savage looking men advance unperturbed by the musketry. His men were mostly conscripts and they had fired too high. Now they had only steel bayonets with which to defend themselves. 'Get in close, boys!' Powell ordered. 'A Shawnee Indian named Blue Jacket once told me that a naked woman stirs a man's blood, but a naked blade stirs his soul. So go in with the steel. Lunge! Recover! Stance!' 'Charge!' Gamble turned the order into a long, guttural yell of defiance. Those redcoats and seamen, with loaded weapons discharged them at the press of the defenders, and a man in the front rank went down with a dark hole in his forehead. Gamble saw the officer aim a pistol at him. A wounded Frenchman, half-crawling, tried to stab with his sabre-briquet, but Gamble kicked him in the head. He dashed forward, sword held low. The officer pulled the trigger, the weapon tugged the man's arm to his right, and the ball buzzed past Gamble's mangled ear as he jumped down into the gap made by the marines charge. A French corporal wearing a straw hat drove his bayonet at Gamble's belly, but he dodged to one side and rammed his bar-hilt into the man's dark eyes. 'Lunge! Recover! Stance!”

WarFictionHistoryHistorical FictionAssaultFrench RevolutionMilitary HistoryEbookBritish ArmyFortressMaltaRoyal NavyRoyal Marines
Book:Heart of Oak
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“Loving, of enemies is another dogma of feigned morality, and has besides no meaning. It is incumbent on man, as a moralist, that he does not revenge an injury; and it is equally as good in a political sense, for there is no end to retaliation; each retaliates on the other, and calls it justice: but to love in proportion to the injury, if it could be done, would be to offer a premium for a crime. Besides, the word enemies is too vague and general to be used in a moral maxim, which ought always to be clear and defined, like a proverb. If a man be the enemy of another from mistake and prejudice, as in the case of religious opinions, and sometimes in politics, that man is different to an enemy at heart with a criminal intention; and it is incumbent upon us, and it contributes also to our own tranquillity, that we put the best construction upon a thing that it will bear. But even this erroneous motive in him makes no motive for love on the other part; and to say that we can love voluntarily, and without a motive, is morally and physically impossible. Morality is injured by prescribing to it duties that, in the first place, are impossible to be performed, and if they could be would be productive of evil; or, as before said, be premiums for crime. The maxim of doing as we would be done unto does not include this strange doctrine of loving enemies; for no man expects to be loved himself for his crime or for his enmity. Those who preach this doctrine of loving their enemies, are in general the greatest persecutors, and they act consistently by so doing; for the doctrine is hypocritical, and it is natural that hypocrisy should act the reverse of what it preaches. For my own part, I disown the doctrine, and consider it as a feigned or fabulous morality; yet the man does not exist that can say I have persecuted him, or any man, or any set of men, either in the American Revolution, or in the French Revolution; or that I have, in any case, returned evil for evil.”

LoveJusticeCrimeMoralityIntentionRevengeMeaningMotiveHypocrisyInjuryDogmaLovingVaguePersecutionEnemiesAmerican RevolutionProverbFrench RevolutionMaximPreachFeigned MoralityLove Thy EnemyPremius
Book:The age of reason
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“This society [Jesuits] has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, or Napoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed the progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally. {Letter to Thomas Jefferson, November 4, 1816. Adams wrote an anonymous 4 volume work on the destructive history of the Jesuits}”

HistoryCalamityDespotismFrench RevolutionNapoleonThomas JeffersonJesuitsJeffersonNapoleon Bonaparte
Book:The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson & Abigail & John Adams
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“8 April 1891 The obscenity of nostrils and mouths; the ignominious cupidity of smiles and women encountered in the street; the shifty baseness on every side, as of hyenas and wild beasts ready to bite: tradesmen in their shops and strollers on their pavements. How long must I suffer this? I have suffered it before, as a child, when, descending by chance to the servant's quarters, I overheard in astonishment their vile gossip, tearing up my own kind with their lovely teeth. This hostility to the entire race, this muted detestation of lynxes in human form, I must have rediscovered it later while at school. I had a repugnance and horror for all base instincts, but am I not myself instinctively violent and lewd, murderous and sensual? Am I any different, in essence, from the members of the riotous and murderous mob of a hundred years ago, who hurled the town sergeants into the Seine and cried, 'String up the aristos!' just as they shout 'Down with the army!' or 'Death to the Jews!”

ArmyViolentSensualServantBeastGossipDecadenceFrench RevolutionJewsClass WarfareMisanthropyObscenityBasenessDecadentMurderousLewdBase Instincts
Book:Monsieur de Phocas
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“In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated. Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence, and were left with nothing but their wealth.”

OppressionAristocracyFrench Revolution1968AntisemitismPolitical StruggleWealth DisparityAlexis De Tocqueville
Book:The Origins of Totalitarianism
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“…the rising movement of romanticism, with its characteristic idealism, one that tended toward a black-and-white view of the world based on those ideas, preferred for different reasons that women remain untinged by “masculine” traits of learning. Famous romantic writers such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt criticized the bluestockings. …and Hazlitt declared his 'utter aversion to Bluestockingism … I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.' Because of the tremendous influence that romanticism gained over the cultural mind-set, the term bluestocking came to be a derogatory term applied to learned, pedantic women, particularly conservative ones. ... Furthermore, learned women did not fit in with the romantic notion of a damsel in distress waiting to be rescued by a knight in shining armor any more than they fit in with the antirevolutionary fear of progress.”

CultureReadingWomenEducationKnowledgeLearningCriticsIntelligenceAuthorWriterIdealismShockingRomanticismFemale EmpowermentFrench RevolutionFemale EducationLord ByronHannah MoreRomantic EraSamuel Taylor ColeridgeBluestockingWilliam HazlittAnti EducationAnti Female EducationFear Of ProgressShocking Criticism
Book:Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist
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“Acel gest simbolic de a o întrona pe Déesse Raison la Notre-Dame pare să fi însemnat pentru lumea apuseană ceva asemănător cu tăierea Stejarilor lui Wotan de către misionarii creştini, căci nici atunci, nici acum, fulgerul răzbunător nu i-a lovit pe nelegiuiţi. Este probabil mai mult decât o glumă a istoriei universale faptul că tocmai în acel moment şi tocmai un francez, Anquetil du Perron, se afla în India şi, la începutul secolului al XIX-lea, aducea acasă o traducere a Oupnek’hat, o culegere de cincizeci de Upanişade, care au permis pentru prima oară Occidentului să arunce o privire mai adâncă înăuntrul enigmaticului spirit al Orientului … Masa anonimă de oameni întunecaţi, care s-a adunat cu gânduri distrugătoare în Notre-Dame, s-a năpustit şi asupra individului, nimerindu-l şi pe Anquetil du Perron, în care a provocat un răspuns devenit istoric. De la el se trag Schopenhauer şi Nietzsche, de la el apare acea influenţă spirituală încă incalculabilă a Orientului.”

EnlightenmentFrench RevolutionNietzscheSchopenhauerUpanishadIrationalism
Book:Civilization in transition
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“To the Jacobins of this epoch [the French Revolution], as well as to those of our times, this popular entity constitutes a superior personality possessing attributes peculiar to the gods of never having to answer for their actions and never making a mistake. Their wishes must be humbly acceded to. The people may kill, burn, ravage, commit the most frightening cruelties, glorify their hero today and throw him into the gutter tomorrow, it is all the same; the politicians will not cease to vaunt the people's virtues and to bow to their every decision.”

PeopleCrowdsProletariatFrench RevolutionThe MassesWill Of The PeopleJacobin Politics
Book:The Psychology of Revolution
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“The revolutionary Terror, which is attacked for its revolutionary tribunal, its law of suspects and its guillotine, was a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty in which the object was to conquer tyranny or die for liberty. This Terror was willed by those who, having won sovereign power by dint of insurrection, refused to let this be destroyed by counter-revolutionary enemies”

PhilosophyRevolutionTerrorismFrench RevolutionThe Terror
Book:In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution
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“Life - hers and her family's - had become like a constantly twisting road and you never knew what fresh horrors might confront you around every bend; a road full of ruts and jolts. And sometimes you said you couldn't take any more jolts - but somehow you did. You took what came, and you took it with a stamina that you never imagined you possessed; but always you were tense, apprehensive, scared - wondering what was coming next.”

French RevolutionLafayette
Book:Patriot's Daughter: The Story of Anastasia Lafayette for teen-age girls
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“The truth is that, in times of turmoil, people look for a scapegoat to sacrifice. Marie Antoinette just happened to be the French Revolution's favorite It girl. To be fair, Marie Antoinette lived in a world which she was expected to obey her husband as if he were God,, to spill forth children as if she were Eve--- and then accept that aristocrats ate cake while peasants had no bread. After all, it was divine will and all that.”

FranceFrench RevolutionMarie Antoinette
Book:Doomed Queens: Royal Women Who Met Bad Ends, From Cleopatra to Princess Di
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“Burke's complaint against the [(French)] revolutionaries was that they assumed the right to spend all trusts and endowments on their own self-made emergency. Schools, church foundations, hospitals - all institutions that had been founded by people, now dead, for the benefit of their successors - were expropriated or destroyed, the result being the total waste of accumulated savings, leading to massive inflation, the collapse of education and the loss of the traditional forms of social and medical relief. In this way contempt for the dead leads to the disenfranchisement of the unborn, and all that result is not, perhaps, inevitable, it has been repeated by all subsequent revolutions. Through their contempt for the intentions and emotions of those who had laid things by, revolutions have systematically destroyed the stock of social capital, and always revolutionaries justify this by impeccable utilitarian thinking.”

Social ResponsibilityFrench RevolutionSocial CapitalRevolutionsEdmund Burke
Book:Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition
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“The Revolution wants the destruction of the social kingdom of Jesus Christ, it wants to erase every last trace of it. The Revolution, that is the totally de-Christianised society, that is Christ pushed away to the corner of the individual conscience. One wants to banish Christ from the public and social sphere; banished from the State, which refuses to seek in His authority any more the affirmation of its own; banished from the laws, of which His law is no longer the sovereign rule; banished from the family, which is excluded from His blessing; banished from the school, where His teaching no longer constitutes the soul of education; banished from science, where He obtains as His only honour only a kind of neutrality that is just as offensive as contradiction; banished from everywhere, except perhaps from that little corner of the soul where one still grants Him a remnant of rule.”

JesusCatholic ChurchFrench RevolutionChristendomJezus
Author:Charles Emile Freppel
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“He stepped back, looked up. Cut into the stone above his head were the words RUE MARAT. For a moment he had the urge to turn back around the corner, climb the stairs, shout to the servants not to bother unpacking, they’d be returning to Arcis in the morning. He looked up to the lighted windows above his head. If I go up there, he thought, I’ll never be free again. If I go up there I commit myself to Max, to joining with him to finish Hébert, and perhaps to governing with him. I commit myself to fishing Fabre out of trouble—though God alone knows how that’s to be managed. I put myself once more under the threat of assassination; I recommence the blood feuds, the denunciations. His face hardened. You can’t stand in the street calling into question the last five years of your life, just because they’ve changed the street name; you can’t let it alter the future. No, he thought—and he saw it clearly, for the first time—it’s an illusion, about quitting, about going back to Arcis to farm. I’ve been lying to Louise: once in, never out.”

French RevolutionPoliticsics
Book:A Place of Greater Safety
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“Marx’s Manifesto, pub­lished in 1847, reflects the state of historical science of the period. It fixes the thirteenth century as the beginning of the “battle against feudal absolutism” and attributes to the bourgeoisie “an essentially revolutionary role” in history. Did the bourgeoisie not uproot the countryside from a “state of torpor and latent barbarism”? These are all propositions that are today [1977] unacceptable for the historian; those who continue to perpetuate such errors of vocabulary, which are intellectually necessary if one wants to maintain at any price the feudalism-bourgeoisie-proletariat, prolong an am­biguity just as erroneous as the continued use of the term "Gothic ” during the era of Marx. In other words, the Marxist historians, who speak of feudalism destroyed by the French revolution, make one think of those ecclesiastics who see in the Second Vatican Council the "end of the Constantinian period” — as if nothing had happened, in more than sixteen hundred years, between Constantine and Vatican II.”

MarxismFrench RevolutionFeudalismMarxists
Book:Those Terrible Middle Ages!: Debunking the Myths
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“All in all, French armies wrought much suffering in Europe, but they also radically changed the lay of the land. In much of Europe, gone were feudal relations; the power of the guilds; the absolutist control of monarchs and princes; the grip of the clergy on economic, social, and political power; and the foundation of ancien régime, which treated different people unequally based on their birth status. These changes created the type of inclusive economic institutions that would then allow industrialization to take root in these places. By the middle of the nineteenth century, industrialization was rapidly under way in almost all the places that the French controlled, whereas places such as Austria-Hungary and Russia, which the French did not conquer, or Poland and Spain, where French hold was temporary and limited, were still largely stagnant.”

FranceFrench RevolutionNapoleonic Wars
Author:Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson
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“Darks drifts covered the horizon. A strange shadow approaching nearer and nearer, was spreading little by little over men, over things, over ideas; a shadow which came from indignations and from systems. All that had been hurriedly stifled was stirring and fermenting. Sometimes the conscious of the honest man caught its breath, there was so much confusion in that air in which sophisms were mingled with truths. Minds trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of the storm. The electric tension was so great that at certain moments any chance-comer, thought unknown, flashed out. Then the twilight darkness fell again. At intervals, deep and sullen mutterings enabled men to judge of the amount of lightning in the cloud.”

GovernmentPoliticsRevolutionCivil WarRevoltFrench RevolutionLes Misérables
Author:Victor Hugo
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“The Comtesse's fellow prisoners in this antechamber to death were characteristic of the ill-assorted gatherings thrown together in Revolutionary prisons: duchesses and prostitutes, actresses and politicians: the Duchesse de Crequy-Montmorency and Madame Roland; Madame du Barry and Madame Brissot; the random debris of a sunken ship thrown together for a moment by the tide of fortune and a moment later violently dispersed. All of them were already ghosts, standing on the shoreline of the last limits of life, waiting their turn for Charon and his grim tumbrel to ferry them across the Styx.”

PoliticsHistoryFranceTragicFrench RevolutionMadame Du Barry
Author:Stanley Loomis
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“It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. … Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.”

JesusFreedomResponsibilityMarriageChristianityCorruptionSocialismDictatorshipHitlerFrench RevolutionNietzscheCelibacyInquisitionFreudMarxStalinLeninGalileoSubhuman
Book:Listen, Little Man!
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“We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive- and a few are enough to carry on.”

ThinkingHumansWarEnoughProcessEffortRaceBreakDemocracyProgressSocietyRevolutionTownsDrivenAwakeningMinoritiesNow And ThenReformationHaltBarbariansBreak ThroughFrench RevolutionHuman ProgressHorde
Author:H. L. Mencken
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“A revolution is bloody, but America is in a unique position. She's the only country in history in a position actually to become involved in a bloodless revolution. The Russian revolution was bloody, Chinese revolution was bloody, French revolution was bloody, Cuban revolution was bloody, and there was nothing more bloody then the American Revolution. But today this country can become involved in a revolution that won't take bloodshed. All she's got to do is give the black man in this country everything that's due him, everything.”

MenGivingCountryTodayAmericaBlackPositionRevolutionInvolvedUniqueDuesChineseBloodyAmerican RevolutionCubanBloodshedFrench RevolutionRussian RevolutionCuban RevolutionChinese Revolution
Author:Malcolm X
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“Human rights did not begin with the French Revolution...[they] really stem from a mixture of Judaism and Christianity...[we English] had 1688, our quiet revolution, where Parliament exerted its will over the King...it was not the sort of Revolution that France's was...'Liberty, equality, fraternity' - they forgot obligations and duties I think. And then of course the fraternity went missing for a long time.”

ThinkingHumansLongCoursesLibertyChristianityRightsMissingDutyRevolutionKingsQuietLong TimeHuman RightsObligationFranceStemJudaismParliamentMixturesFraternityFrench Revolution
Book:As I said to Denis--: the Margaret Thatcher book of quotations
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“It was a real revolution. But with one missing feature. That is the feeling in a people that "We have done it once, and if the new lot let us down, we can do it again!" It was that proud, menacing confidence which made the French revolution special. But it's not around in 21st-century Europe. After 1989, the people handed over liberty to the experts. Will they ever want it back?”

PeopleIfsWantMadeRealDoneFeelingsCan DoLibertySpecialCenturyMissingRevolutionProudEuropeFeaturesExperts21st CenturyFrench Revolution
Author:Neal Ascherson
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