The French Revolution Quotes

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

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} ~ John Adams

[On the eve of the French Revolution:]
It is impossible to imagine a more disorderly Assembly. They neither reason, examine, nor discuss. They clap those whom they approve and hiss those whom they disapprove. . . .

Everything almost is elective, and consequently no one obeys. It is an anarchy beyond conception, and they will be obliged to take back their chains for some time to come at least. And so much for that licentious spirit which they dignify with the name of "Love of Liberty." Their Literati, whose heads are turned by romantic notions picked up in books, and who are too lofty to look down upon that kind of man which really exists, and too wise to heed the dictates of common-sense and experience, have turned the heads of their countrymen, and they have run-a-muck at a Don Quixote constitution such as you are blessed with in Pennsylvania. I need say no more. You will judge of the effects of such a constitution upon people supremely depraved. ~ Gouverneur Morris

It was the French Revolution that served as the catalyst of this renovation. Its impact was to make the concept of popular sovereignty the new moral justification for the political system of historical capitalism. ~ Immanuel Wallerstein

Unlike the rationalism of the French Revolution, true liberalism has no quarrel with religion, and I can only deplore the militant and essentially illiberal antireligionism which animated so much of nineteenth-century Continental liberalism ... What distinguishes the liberal from the conservative here is that, however profound his own spiritual beliefs, he will never regard himself as entitled to impose them on others and that for him the spiritual and the temporal are different sphere which ought not to be confused. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Described in this way, utilitarianism has little in common with the prosaic, visionless notion of the 'merely utilitarian,' in the sense of a narrowly or mundanely functional or efficient option. No such limited horizon confined the thought and character of the great English-language utilitarian philosophers, whose influence ran its course from the period just before the French Revolution through the Victorian era. Happiness, for them, was more of a cosmic calling, the path to world progress, and whatever was deemed 'utilitarian' had to be useful for that larger and inspiring end, the global minimization of pointless suffering and the global maximization of positive well-being or happiness. It invokes, ultimately, the point of view of universal benevolence. And it is more accurately charged with being too demanding ethically than with being too accommodating of narrow practicality, material interests, self-interestedness, and the like. ~ Bart Schultz

The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848. ~ C.L.R. James

The French Revolution, which is nothing more nor less than the ideal armed with the sword, rose abruptly, and by that very movement, closed the door of evil and opened the door of good.
It released the question, promulgated truth, drove away miasma, purified the century, crowned the people.
We can say it created man a second time, in giving him a second soul, his rights. Page 997 Saint-Denis chapter 7 Argot part III ~ Victor Hugo

These ideas grew out of the Enlightenment; their roots are in Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, Humboldt's Limits of State Action, Kant's insistence, in his defense of the French Revolution, that freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved. With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order. In fact, on the very same assumptions that led classical liberalism to oppose the intervention of the state in social life, capitalist social relations are also intolerable. ~ Noam Chomsky

To say my day was not going well, would be like saying the French Revolution had been a bit troublesome for Marie Antoinette. ~ Nichole Chase

The Allies had made war on Napoleon as a tyrant and an oppressor of nations; yet once they had got him out of the way, they did him the favor of representing him as the torchbearer of the French Revolution. They did him the further favor of repeating his mistakes and besting him at them. ~ J. Christopher Herold

The French revolution, he concluded, had not produced any new principles of truths, merely a mass of examples of how things could go wrong. ~ Mike Jay

The most lasting and universal consequence of the French revolution is the metric system ~ Eric Hobsbawm

Anyone who studies the state of things which preceded the French Revolution will see that the tremendous catastrophe came about from so excessive a regulation of men's actions in all their details, and such an enormous drafting away of the products of their actions to maintain the regulating organization, that life was fast becoming impracticable. And if we ask what then made, and now makes, this error possible, we find it to be the political superstition that governmental power is subject to no restraints. ~ Herbert Spencer

The recent experience of totalitarianism in Europe was foreshadowed at the French Revolution, when the Committee of Public Safety acted in the same way as the Nazi and Communist parties, setting up 'parallel structures' through which to control the state and to exert a micromanagerial tyranny over every aspect of civil society.
Let us at least be realistic, and recognize that, if totalitarian governments have arisen and spread with such rapidity in modern times, this is because there is something in human nature to which they correspond and on which they draw for their moral energy. ~ Roger Scruton

The French Revolution, by claiming to build history on the principle of absolute purity,
inaugurates modern times simultaneously with the era of formal morality. ~ Albert Camus

{Comment to Delambre on chemist Antoine Lavoisier's execution during the French Revolution}

Only a moment to cut off that head and a hundred years may not give us another like it. ~ Joseph-Louis Lagrange

My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal. ~ Julius Evola

The French Revolution gave us three ... powerful ideas, or concepts - liberty, equality and fraternity. But these ideas ... are not only right in themselves, but they are so because they come in the proper order. You cannot have equality without liberty, and you certainly cannot have fraternity without equality. The importance of this I learnt from music, because music evolves in time, and therefore the order inevitably determines the content. ~ Daniel Barenboim

This entails certain corollaries on which true individualism once more stands in sharp opposition to the false individualism of the rationalistic type. The first is that the deliberately organized state on the one side, and the individual on the other, far from being regarded as the only realities, which all the intermediate formations and associations are to be deliberately suppressed, as was the aim of the French Revolution, the noncompulsory conventions of social intercourse are considered as essential factors in preserving the orderly working in human society. The second is that the individual, in participating in the social processes, must be ready and willing to adjust himself to changes and to submit to conventions which are not the result of intelligent design, whose justification in the particular instance may be recognizable, and which to him will often appear unintelligible and irrational. I need not say much on the first point. That true individualism affirms the value of the family and all the common efforts of the small community and group, that it believes in local autonomy and voluntary associations, and that indeed its case rests largely on the contention that much for which the coercive action of the state is usually invoked can be done better by voluntary collaboration need not be stressed further. There can be no greater contrast to this than the false individualism which wants to dissolve all these smaller groups into atoms which have no cohesion other th ~ Friedrich A. Hayek

When Freemasons vainglory on their deeds during the French Revolution, they forget that many innocents paid with their own life for that, including pregnant women and children from the royal families, and those that have witness it didn't forget, and will likewise turn the karma back on them in the years to come, making their innocents pay for the guilty ones. ~ Robin Sacredfire

I want to make love to the French Revolution. Or maybe just get some head from Robespierre. ~ Jarod Kintz

In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry. ~ Bertrand Russell

Another example is the modern political order. Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction. Anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes of nineteenth-century Europe gave priority to individual freedom even if it meant throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to join schools for pickpockets. Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism's egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of daily life. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

To narrow natural rights to such neat slogans as "liberty, equality, fraternity" or "life, liberty, property," . . . was to ignore the complexity of public affairs and to leave out of consideration most moral relationships. . . .

Burke appealed back beyond Locke to an idea of community far warmer and richer than Locke's or Hobbes's aggregation of individuals. The true compact of society, Burke told his countrymen, is eternal: it joins the dead, the living, and the unborn. We all participate in this spiritual and social partnership, because it is ordained of God. In defense of social harmony, Burke appealed to what Locke had ignored: the love of neighbor and the sense of duty. By the time of the French Revolution, Locke's argument in the Second Treatise already had become insufficient to sustain a social order. . . .

The Constitution is not a theoretical document at all, and the influence of Locke upon it is negligible, although Locke's phrases, at least, crept into the Declaration of Independence, despite Jefferson's awkwardness about confessing the source of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

If we turn to the books read and quoted by American leaders near the end of the eighteenth century, we discover that Locke was but one philosopher and political advocate among the many writers whose influence they acknowledged. . . .

Even Jefferson, though he had read Locke, cites in his Commonplace Book such juridical authorities ~ Russell Kirk

The nation-state became powerful in the wake of the French Revolution, whereas the nation-state has become powerless in light of globalization. ~ Grace Lee Boggs

With dozens of course offerings, UCLA's history department doesn't have a single course on the French Revolution, or even a course that would seem to cover Western Europe during that period. There are courses on European history in the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as from 1450 to 1660. And there's a Western Civilization class covering the period up to 1715. But if you want to know what was happening outside of the United States circa 1750 to 1800, ~ Ann Coulter

In fact, after having abolished the monarchy, the best of all governments, [the French Revolution] had transferred all the public power to the people - the people ... ever easy to deceive and to lead into every excess ~ Pope Pius VI

He was guillotined in the French Revolution, and he said he'd keep blinking his eyes after his head was off, for as long as he had consciousness. He blinked seventeen times. That's a scientist, Gill said. ~ Jo Walton

It's not uncommon for revolutions to stem from a radicalized group just outside the circle of power. That's what the French Revolution was all about; that's what the American Revolution was. The question is: Will all those groups, because of the nature of partisan polarization and ideological polarization, just fight each other? Or is there capacity to organize? ~ Chris Hayes

It was Dostoevsky, once again, who drew from the French Revolution and its seeming hatred of the Church the lesson that "revolution must necessarily begin with atheism." That is absolutely true. But the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Goethe (I don't know why, but Goethe somehow always speaks up in my critical moments) said: "Man must experience his own destiny" - not a factual destiny forced on him by History, but the nonrecurrent, his very own. Perhaps this was possible a hundred years ago. At the time of the French Revolution and also of the Napoleonic Wars, an individual still had the means of turning against the collective destiny adroitly, cunningly. He could hide or build emergency dams hastily in his soul. And a hundred years ago when someone mounted the scaffold or fell on the battlefield, he knew that what was then being consummated personally was his destiny. But today? There is no longer a "personal destiny;" there are only statistical probabilities. One cannot feel it to be personal destiny when an atom bomb explodes or when a dictatorship enunciates an outmoded, stupid judgment on a society. This is why I must go somewhere from this place where, perhaps, it will be possible for me to live my own destiny for a time. Because here I have already become only a piece of data in a category. ~ Sandor Marai

I'm a let you finish, but the French Revolution had the best severed heads of ALL TIME. ~ Kanye West

[Mr. Bates comments on the description of Robespierre in History of the French Revolution by M. J. L. Adolphe Thiers]
He was a living proof that[,] in civil troubles, obstinate mediocrity is more powerful than the irregularity of genius. It is not only in civil troubles but in all the affairs of life, that obstinate mediocrity triumphs over irregular genius, and enjoys the fruits of victory.
The Diary of Edward Bates, Entry for March 7, 1865, Edited by Howard K. Beale
~ Edward Bates

Divine
transcendence, up to 1789, served to justify the arbitrary actions of the king. After the French Revolution,
the transcendence of the formal principles of reason or justice serves to justify a rule that is neither just
nor reasonable. This transcendence is therefore a mask that must be torn off. God is dead, but as Stirner
predicted, the morality of principles in which the memory of God is still preserved must also be killed.
The hatred of formal virtue - degraded witness to divinity and false witness in the service of injustice -
has remained one of the principal themes of history today. Nothing is pure: that is the cry which
convulses our period. Impurity, the equivalent of history, is going to become the rule, and the
abandoned earth will be delivered to naked force, which will decide whether or not man is divine. Thus
lies and violence are adopted in the same spirit in which a religion is adopted and on the same
heartrending impulse. ~ Albert Camus

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution. ~ Edvard Munch

Christianity - and that is its greatest merit - has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the Cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame. This talisman [the cross] is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably. Then ... a play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll. ~ Heinrich Heine

I'd heard him tell a woman who complained he never helped her achieve orgasm, that she should treasure the memory of her last orgasm, since it probably predated the French Revolution. ~ Andre Aciman

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. ~ Margaret Thatcher

He began with the core principle he had intoned at the dawn of his political career 25 years before: A democratic Calvinist in the Netherlands could not vote Democratic in the United States because that party trays its origins to Thomas Jefferson, who in turn had endorsed the principles of the French Revolution. ~ James Bratt

No wonder the summer solstice had been such a fun day in northern Europe before Christian missionaries arrived from the sunny south. If priests had not driven sex underground, what would the north have been like? Would art have flourished in the absence of sexual repression? What about artillery and fortification? The Reformation? The Thirty Years War? The French Revolution? The final perfection of murder as blood sport at Verdun and Dresden and in the Gulag?

In short, where would we be without Jesus? ~ Charles McCarry

Well, you have said that you were quite certain I was not a serious anarchist. Does this place strike you as being serious?"
"It does seem to have a moral under all its gaiety," assented Syme; "but may I ask you two questions? You need not fear to give me information, because, as you remember, you very wisely extorted from me a promise not to tell the police, a promise I shall certainly keep. So it is in mere curiosity that I make my queries. First of all, what is it really all about? What is it you object to? you want to abolish Government?"
"To abolish God!" said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. "We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights and we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong."
"And Right and Left," said Syme with a simple eagerness. "I hope you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me. ~ G.K. Chesterton

That's sort of what happened with Cassie and me. I guess I was Goya, just doing my thing, and she was the French Revolution. ~ Claire Messud

No one knows any longer whether the reintroduction of the bear in Pyrenees, kolkhozes, aerosols, the Green Revolution, the anti-smallpox vaccine, Star Wars, the Muslim religion, partridge hunting, the French Revolution, service industries, labour unions, cold fusion, Bolshevism, relativity, Slovak nationalism, commercial sailboats, and so on, are outmoded, up to date, futuristic, atemporal, nonexistent, or permanent. ~ Bruno Latour

On the heels of the Enlightenment came the French Revolution: a brief promise of democracy followed by a train of regicides, putsches, fanatics, mobs, terrors, and preemptive wars, culminating in a megalomaniacal emperor and an insane war of conquest. More than a quarter of a million people were killed in the Revolution and its aftermath, and another 2 to 4 million were killed in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In reflecting on this catastrophe, it was natural for people to reason, "After this, therefore because of this," and for intellectuals on the right and the left to blame the Enlightenment. This is what you get, they say, when you eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, ~ Steven Pinker

Most observers of the French Revolution, especially the clever and noble ones, have explained it as a life-threatening and contagious illness. They have remained standing with the symptoms and have interpreted these in manifold and contrary ways. Some have regarded it as a merely local ill. The most ingenious opponents have pressed for castration. They well noticed that this alleged illness is nothing other than the crisis of beginning puberty. ~ Novalis

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things. ~ Hilary Mantel

Your mother, my mother, and mother of pearl walk into a bar, and the bartender says, "Hello, dad, you look more like whiskey than I remember. Have you been tanning?" To which all three mothers respond, "The French Revolution was the best thing to ever happen inside a croissant the shape of the Fertile Crescent, with a flaky crust like a politician with dandruff." Of course, when Orafoura told me this joke, I didn't laugh, because I don't like jokes involving politics, religion, or mother of pearl. ~ Jarod Kintz

The two goals of liberation and social justice are not obviously compatible, any more than were the liberty and equality advocated at the French Revolution. If liberation involves the liberation of individual potential, how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead, and what should we allow ourselves by way of constraining them? ~ Roger Scruton

In the eighteenth century, with the growth of publishing and with the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment, there was a great demand for new historical writing. The greatest product of this was The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a massive six-volume work published between 1776 and 1788, precisely between the American Revolution and the French Revolution. The context is important, as the author Edward Gibbon was examining not only the greatness of Rome, but the forces which brought about its decay.
......
Gibbon's interpretation of history was controversial, especially in its examination of the growth of Christianity, but his accurate scholarship and engaging prose style have made The Decline and Fall the most enduring work of history in English.

In the eighteenth century, history is seen as a branch of belles-lettres, and it subsumes within it scriptural authority on the one hand, and fictional narrative on the other. History is, in effect, the new secular authority of the Enlightenment, and comes to be a very wide-ranging category of writing. ~ Ronald Carter

One wonders why there are so many women who follow Robespierre to his home, to the Jacobins, to the Cordeliers and to the Convention. It is because the French Revolution is a religion and Robespierre is one of its sects. He is a priest with his flock ... Robespierre preaches, Robespierre censures, he is furious, serious, melancholic and exalted with passion. He thunders against the rich and the great. He lives on little and has no physical needs. He has only one mission: to talk. And he talks all the time. ~ Nicolas De Caritat, Marquis De Condorcet

The French revolution was a .eune invented and constructed for the purpose of manufacturing liberty; but it had neither lever cogs, nor adjusting powers, and the consequences were that it worked so rapidly that it destroyed its own inventors, and set itself on fire. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London's primacy in the money markets. ~ Gore Vidal

Carla Hesse has given us an astonishing new look at women's struggle for independent expression and moral autonomy during the French Revolution and afterward. Denied the political and civil rights of men, literary women plunged into the expanded world of publication, answering the men's philosophical treatises with provocative novels about women's choices and chances. Lively and learned, The Other Enlightenment links women from Madame de Stael to Simone de Beauvoir in an alternate and daring path to the modern. ~ Natalie Zemon Davis

In 1800, in the first interparty contest, the Federalists warned that presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson, because of his sympathy expressed at the outset of the French Revolution, was 'the son of a half-breed Indian squaw' who would put opponents under the guillotine. ~ Robert Dallek

The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today not by the dead hand of tradition but by modernity itself, and they can be salvaged only by moving beyond it. ~ Harvey Cox

Davy's work in Bristol came under attack by conservative politicians, including the famous Irish MP Edmund Burke, who accused the gas experiments of promoting not only atheism but the French Revolution. ~ Mark Kurlansky

It is no wonder that Mary loves our day and age. Thanks to persecution, we are giving more to her Son than any other age or day since Calvary. The Nazis in Germany, Austria, and Poland; The Reds in all the Balkan lands, Russia, and now in China, have done more for heaven than ever did the Roman Caesars, the kings and queens of England, or the madmen of the French Revolution. They have done more for the earth, too. For while peopling heaven with martyrs, they have also spread far and wide the grace of Christ Jesus, thanks to the oneness of His mystical body. ~ M. Raymond

The more we gained knowledge of these new totalitarian systems of mass-rule, the more we realized not only their similarity of structure, but also the fact that we had to do with a type of dominance that had been known in earlier epochs. We discovered that what the ancients called "tyrannis," or 'cheirokratia," what Sulla or the tyrants of the Italian Rennaissance had practised, and what finally alarmed the world in the French Revolution and under Napoleon, had surprisingly many similarities with modern totalitarianism, although this latter had elements with which they cannot be compared, and although it possessed means of domination unknown in past ages. ~ Wilhelm Ropke

A little man in a threadbare coat spoke up for the poor as if he really knew what he was talking about. The women with the flowers threw them down for him. "That's Robert Speer," one said. "Something like that. He's our man. ~ Marge Piercy

It is the observer of the pun that makes it, my dear Brumm. Of course, when the word is distorted, as in Evilution, the most preoccupied notice it, but in this instance which you try to fasten upon me the crime is yours. There is nothing more contrary to the Evolutionary will than puns. Bloodshed and desolation follow in their wake. Their English heyday, which was in the reign of James I, caused the great civil war; in France they flourished most rankly under Louis XV, and produced the French Revolution. I have considered puns, and apart altogether from their hateful effect, as shown in history, it is certain that they are quite unevolutionary, because I, the fittest of men, am unable to make them. You will consult your own welfare, and that of the nation, Brougham, by refraining in future. ~ John Davidson

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? ~ Neal Ascherson

Among the lessons taught by the French revolution, there is none sadder or more striking than this
that you may make everything else out of the passions of men except a political system that will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma. ~ James Russell Lowell

Edmund Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. Any society, he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which destroys the fabric of its state, must soon be "disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality". ~ Tony Judt

The French Revolution will be found to have had great influence on the strength of parties, and on the subsequent political transactions of the United States. ~ John Marshall

What are the present governments of Europe, but a scene of iniquity and oppression? What is that of England? Do not its own inhabitants say, It is a market where every man has his price, and where corruption is common traffic, at the expense of a deluded people? No wonder, then, that the French Revolution is traduced. ~ Thomas Paine

If our school ever performed a play about the French Revolution, she could play the guillotine. ~ Robin Benway

The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles. ~ Terry Eagleton

The men who rush into undertakings of vast change usually feel they are in possession of some irresistible power. The generation that made the French Revolution had an extravagant conception of the omnipotence of man's reason and the boundless range of his intelligence. Never, says de Tocqueville, had humanity been prouder of itself nor had it ever so much faith in its own omnipotence. ~ Eric Hoffer

The annals of the French Revolution prove that the knowledge of the few cannot counteract the ignorance of the many ... The light of philosophy, when it is confined to a small minority, points out the possessors as the victims rather than the illuminators of the multitude. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What kind of town is this
What sort of streets are these
Who invented this
who profits by it
I saw peddlers
at every corner
they're selling little guillotines
with tiny sharp blades
and dolls filled with red liquid
which spurts fro the neck
when the sentence is carried out.
What kind of children are these
who can play
with this toys so efficiently
and who is judging ~ Peter Weiss

The transformations of the French empire itself or of French power structures themselves as well as the emergence of a kind of language of equal rights starting with the American Revolution and the French Revolution provided an opportunity and in some ways connected with other kinds of ground level desires or hopes and ideologies for freedom that were coming out of the plantation regime itself. ~ Laurent Dubois

There is a noticeable general difference between the sciences and mathematics on the one hand, and the humanities and social sciences on the other. It's a first approximation, but one that is real. In the former, the factors of integrity tend to dominate more over the factors of ideology. It's not that scientists are more honest people. It's just that nature is a harsh taskmaster. You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like, and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry, and it'll be refuted tomorrow. ~ Noam Chomsky

The war, like all wars, was proving more expensive for the Bourbons than planned. Since the alliance, France had advanced to the Americans over 100 million livres, about $25 million, in loans, supplies and gifts, and before it was over the cost of the American war for France would amount, by some estimates, to 1.5 billion livres, a historic sum that was virtually to bankrupt the French national budget and require the summoning of the Estates General in 1789 that led to the arrest of the King and the sequence of eruptions that became the French Revolution. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The men who were running the church in the late '60s and '70s panicked when they saw the chaos, which developed after the council. The relatively modest changes of those years thawed the ice in which Catholicism had been frozen since the French Revolution. ~ Andrew Greeley

... why do men continue to practice in themselves, the absurdities they despise in others?
Thomas Paine, The rights of man: being an answer to Mr Burke's attack on the French Revolution (2nd edn, Philadelphia, 1791), p. 41. ~ Thomas Paine

For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution. ~ Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

Justice has its anger, Monsieur Bishop, and the wrath of justice is an element of progress. No matter what they say, the French Revolution is the greatest advance taken by mankind since the coming of Christ. ~ Victor Hugo

It is a sad hardship and slavery to people who live in towns, that in their movements they know of one dimension only; they walk along the line as if they were led on a string. The transition from the line to the plane into the two dimensions, when you wander across a field or through a wood, is a splendid liberation to the slaves, like the French Revolution. But in the air you are taken into the full freedom of the three dimensions; after long ages of exile and dreams the homesick heart throws itself into the arms of space. ~ Karen Blixen

The "terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years. ~ Edward Abbey

All throughout the Christian ages, and especially since the French Revolution, the Western world has been haunted by the idea of freedom and equality; it is only an idea, but it has penetrated to all ranks of society ... Even the millionaire suffers from a vague sense of guilt, like a dog eating a stolen leg of mutton. ~ George Orwell

If a single misleading sentence is to sum up the relations of artist and society in this era, we might say that the French Revolution inspired him by its example, the Industrial Revolution by its horror, and the bourgeois society, which emerged from both, transformed his very existence and modes of creation. ~ Eric J. Hobsbawm

At her easiest, she was hard, because her brain was always working, working, working - I had to exert myself just to keep pace with her. I'd spend an hour crafting a casual e-mail to her, I became a student of arcana so I could keep her interested: the Lake poets, the code duello, the French Revolution. Her mind was both wide and deep, and I got smarter being with her. And more considerate, and more active, and more alive, and almost electric, because for Amy, love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result.
Amy made me believe I was exceptional, that I was up to her level of play. That was both our making and undoing. Because I couldn't handle the demands of greatness. I began craving ease and averageness, and I hated myself for it, and ultimately, I realized, I punished her for it. I turned her into the brittle, prickly thing she became. ~ Gillian Flynn

Dissent and dissidence are overwhelmingly the work of the young. It is not by chance that the men and women who initiated the French Revolution, like the reformers and planners of the New Deal and postwar Europe, were distinctly younger than those who had gone before. Rather than resign themselves, young people are more likely to look at a problem and demand that it be solved. ~ Tony Judt

The Demons was as prescient a warning regarding the disaster about to befall Russia as Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was about that cataclysm. On the eve of the French Revolution, Burke cautioned that "criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred." He said the moment one capitulates to the idea that mayhem and murder are justified for the greater good, the greater good is forgotten and mayhem and murder become ends in themselves, until only violence can "satiate their insatiable appetites."50 ~ Ann Coulter

Leader of a backward and ignorant mass, he was yet in the forefront of the great historical movement of his time. The blacks were taking their part in the destruction of European feudalism begun by the French Revolution, and liberty and equality, the slogans of the revolution, meant far more to them than to any Frenchman. That was why in the hour of danger Toussaint, uninstructed as he was, could find the language and accent of Diderot, Rousseau, and Raynal, of Mirabeau, Robespierre and Danton. And in one respect he excelled them all. For even these masters of the spoken and written word, owing to the class complications of their society, too often had to pause, to hesitate, to qualify. Toussaint could defend the freedom of the blacks without reservation, and this gave to his declaration a strength and a single-mindedness rare in the great documents of the time. The French bourgeoisie could not understand it. Rivers of blood were to flow before they understood that elevated as was his tone Toussaint had written neither bombast nor rhetoric but the simple and sober truth. ~ C.L.R. James

Anything that keeps old words in circulation is to be treasured, the French revolution be damned. ~ Joseph Bottum

I think I'll accept the challenge to battle. I can choose the terms, right? And I don't have the faintest idea how to 'prevent' a revolution. Besides, as far as I know, revolutions can get out of hand. Remember the German revolution, with the guillotine?"
Derna smirked. "German revolution? Guillotine? The guillotine was used in the French revolution. Nice try, little brother."
"I'm actually impressed he knew what a guillotine was," commented Armen, deadpan.
I glared at the two of them. Typical big sisters. They'd just ruined my chance to show off my knowledge. ~ Kaivallya Dasu

The essence and value of the law lies in its stability and durability (...), in its "relative eternity." Only then does the legislator's self-limitation and the independence of the law-bound judge find an anchor. The experiences of the French Revolution showed how an unleashed pouvoir législatif could generate a legislative orgy. ~ Carl Schmitt

The French revolution taught us the rights of man. ~ Thomas Sankara

Of course Americans celebrate Independence Day as opposed to Yorktown Day. Who wants to barbecue a hot dog and ponder how we owe our independence to the French navy? Who wants to twirl sparklers and dwell on how the French government's expenditures in America contributed to the bankruptcy that sparked the French Revolution that would send Rochambeau to prison, Lafayette into exile (then prison), and our benefactor His Most Christian Majesty Louis XVI to the guillotine. ~ Sarah Vowell

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. ~ Gustave Le Bon

It took us a long time to get rid of the effects of the French Revolution 200 years ago. We don't want another one. ~ Margaret Thatcher

We think of 1789 as the date of the French Revolution, and the storming of the Bastille as its defining event. Yet as late as halfway through 1792, most of the familiar images of the revolution had yet to occur. Louis XVI was still king, and the Assembly was negotiating a new constitutional arrangement for the monarchy, not so different from Britain's Glorious Revolution of 1688. ~ Mike Jay

The French Revolution printed money because they didn't have any, so they just printed it, and this was a revolutionary step which of course we are still reaping the huge consequences of today. It struck me that this was beginning to happen ... there had been scandals where shares had been printed. ~ Marina Warner

Most of the Ten Commandments are negative. The purpose of law is not to mandate good behavior. That concept comes from the French Revolution. ~ Randall Terry

Tea, late dinners and the French Revolution. I cannot exactly see the connection of ideas. ~ Thomas Love Peacock

By giving full expression to the contradiction between civil society and the state, the French Revolution radically transformed both its terms. To put it differently: dualism was not abolished but, rather, displaced within the space delimited by the two poles of the contradiction. This created a new split between 'man', a member of civil society, and the 'citizen', a member of the state. It is only by 'abstracting' from his condition as man and his insertion into the organization of civil society that the political subject can become a citizen and make his entry into the political community: it is only as a 'sheer, blank individual' who accepts the fact that the political is divorced from the social that he can take part in the life of the state, which is based on the freedom and equality of its citizens.
(...)
The political state is 'abstract' in the sense suggested by the etymology of the word; it appears as the residue or the 'precipitate' of the constitutive movement by means of which civil society transcends its own limits to attain political existence, while leaving its internal differences intact, or, rather, transforming them into mere 'differences of social life' 'without significance in political life'.
The state is incapable of substantially affecting the contents of civil society, for it is, precisely, a product of civil society's abstraction from itself. ~ Stathis Kouvelakis

It is rarely remembered now that socialism in its beginnings was frankly authoritarian. It began quite openly as a reaction against the liberalism of the French Revolution. The French writers who laid its foundation had no doubt that their ideas could be put into practice only by a strong dictatorial government. The first of modern planners, Saint-Simon, predicted that those who did not obey his proposed planning boards would be 'treated as cattle'. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

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