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Quotes by Maximilien Robespierre

French politician & revolutionary (1758 - 1794)

Citizens, did you want a revolution without revolution?

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

Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs.

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

Death is the beginning of immortality.

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

Atheism is aristocratic; the idea of a great Being that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is altogether popular.

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

To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.

What is the end of our revolution? The tranquil enjoyment of liberty and equality; the reign of that eternal justice, the laws of which are graven, not on marble or stone, but in the hearts of men, even in the heart of the slave who has forgotten them, and in that of the tyrant who disowns them.

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.

Crime butchers innocence to secure a throne, and innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime.