Louis Antoine De Saint-Just Quotes

Fame is an empty noise. Let us put our ears to the centuries that have gone: we no longer hear anything; those who, at another time, shall walk among our urns, shall hear no more. The good - that is what we must pursue, whatever the price, preferring the title of a dead hero to that of a living coward.

In the circumstances in which the Republic finds itself, the constitution cannot be inaugurated; it would destroy itself ... The provisional government of France is revolutionary until there is peace.

It is not enough, citizens, to have destroyed the factions, it is necessary now to repair the evil that they have done to the country.

The French people recognizes the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. The first day of every month is to be dedicated to the eternal.

Keep cool and you command everybody.

One cannot reign innocently: the insanity of doing so is evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper.

When a people, having become free, establish wise laws, their revolution is complete ... Peace and prosperity, public virtue, victory, everything is in the vigor of the laws. Outside of the laws, everything is sterile and dead.

The vessel of Revolution can arrive at port only on a sea reddened by torrents of blood.

Monarchy is an outrage which even the blind of an entire people cannot justify ... all men hold from nature the secret mission to destroy wherever it my be found. No man can reign innocently. The folly is too evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper. Do kings themselves treat otherwise those who seek to usurp their authority?

It has always seemed to me that the social order was implicit in the very nature of things, and required nothing more from the human spirit than care in arranging the various elements; that a people could be governed without being made thralls or libertines or victims thereby; that man was born for peace and liberty, and became miserable and cruel only through the action of insidious and oppressive laws. And I believe therefore that if man be given laws which harmonize with the dictates of nature and of his heart he will cease to be unhappy and corrupt.

The legislator commands the future; to be feeble will avail him nothing: it is for him to will what is good and to perpetuate it; to make man what he desires to be: for the laws, working upon the social body, which is inert in itself, can produce either virtue or crime, civilized customs or savagery.

It would be leaving very little to leave a life in which one must
be either the accomplice or the silent witness of evil.

Dare! - this word contains all the politics of our revolution.

If all people are free, all are equal. If they are equal, they are just.

It is time that we labored for the happiness of the people. Legislators who are to bring light and order into the world must pursue their course with inexorable tread, fearless and unswerving as the sun.

I have not found a single good man in government; I have found good only in the people.

One does not make revolutions by halves.

Happiness is a new idea in Europe.

A nation regenerates itself only upon heaps of corpses.