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Maximilien Robespierre Quotes
1758–1794 France
Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre (6 May 1758 – 28 July 1794) was a French lawyer and statesman who was one of the best-known and most influential figures of the French Revolution. As a member of the Constituent Assembly and the Jacobin Club, he campaigned for universal manhood suffrage and the abolition both of celibacy for the clergy, and slavery.
France Heads of state Lawyers Politicians Republicans Also known as: Robespierre, Robespierre, Maximilien
Random Maximilien Robespierre quote
52 quotes
Today, armed men who have come unbeknownst to you and in violation of the laws, have made the streets of this city echo with seditious cries demanding impunity for Louis XVI.
Speech on the Trial of Louis XVI (1792)
Man is born to be happy and free, and everywhere he is enslaved and unhappy! Society exists for the purpose of conserving his rights and perfecting his being, and everywhere society degrades and oppresses him! The time has come to remind him of his true destiny.
Death, so much Death! And the wretches cast it upon me. What a memory I shall leave behind if this lasts. Life is a burden to me
What is the first object of society? It is to maintain the imprescriptible rights of man. What is the first of those rights? The right to life.
On Subsistence (1792)
I leave to the oppressors of humanity a terrible testament, which I proclaim with the independence befitting one whose career is so nearly ended; it is the awful truth: “Thou shalt die!”
Last Speech to the National Convention (1794)
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.
On Political Morality (1794)
I am made to combat crime, not to govern it. The time is not here where good men can serve their patrie with impunity; the defenders of liberty will only be outcasts, as long as the horde of rogues is in control.
Last Speech to the National Convention (1794)
But how would our vile calumniators la feel it? How would the man born blind not have the idea of light? Nature has refused them a soul; they have some right to doubt, not only the immortality of the soul, but its existence.
Last Speech to the National Convention (1794)
England! Ha! What good are they to you, England and its depraved constitution, which may have looked free to you when you had sunk to the lowest degree of servitude, but which it is high time to stop praising out of ignorance or habit!
On the Silver Mark (1791)
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.
On Subsistence (1792)
Happily virtue is natural in the people, [despite] aristocratical prejudices. A nation is truly corrupt, when, after having, by degrees lost its character and liberty, it slides from democracy into aristocracy or monarchy; this is the death of the political body by decrepitude....
On Political Morality (1794)
I know we cannot flatter ourselves that we have attained perfection; but holding up a Republic surrounded by enemies, fortifying reason in favour of liberty, destroying prejudice and nullifying individual efforts against the public interest, demand moral and physical strengths that nature has perhaps denied to those who denounce us and those we are fighting.
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