All Quotes by Maximilien Robespierre
“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”
“Again, it may be said, that to love justice and equality the people need no great effort of virtue; it is sufficient that they love themselves.”
“Every citizen fulfilling the conditions of eligibility that you have prescribed has the right to public office.”
“In every country where nature provides for the needs of men with prodigality, scarcity can only be imputed to defects of administration or of the laws themselves; bad laws and bad administration have their origins in false principles and bad morals.”
“XXIX. When the government violates the people’s rights, insurrection is, for the people and each portion of the people, the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.”
“The aim of constitutional government is to preserve the Republic; that of revolutionary government is to lay its foundation.”
“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!"”
“If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the mainspring of popular government in revolution is both virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is disastrous; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a specific principle as a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our homeland’s most pressing needs.”
“Democracy is a state in which the sovereign people, guided by laws which are its own work, does for itself all that it can do properly, and through delegates all that it cannot do for itself.”