Robespierre Quotes

Modern free-traders... embrace their ideal with a passion that makes Robespierre seem prudent. They embrace unbridled free trade, even as it helps China become a superpower.

Robespierre, this pedant of freedom!

Robespierre, crippled and blind, has yet to be healed to the knowledge that service - his desire - is a deed of savage-speaking gentleness, not soft-spoken savagery.

I have left my balls to Robespierre and my legs to Couthon. That should help the Committee of Public Safety for a while.

The reign of terror to which France submitted has been more justly termed "the reign of cowardice." One knows not which most to execrate,--the nation that could submit to suffer such atrocities, or that low and bloodthirsty demagogue that could inflict them. France, in succumbing to such a wretch as Robespierre, exhibited, not her patience, but her pusillanimity.

And Robespierre, the Incorruptible, who loved us so much he cut off our heads so we would not be troubled by too many thoughts.

Robespierre, however, was not the type of leader finally destined to emerge from the Revolution.

You Bollinger Bolshevik, you ritzy Robespierre, you lounge-lizard Lenin. Look at you, swilling Max’s champagne and calling yourself a socialist.

These words are more revolutionary than anything written by Robespierre, Marx, or Lenin.

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.

An individualism which has got beyond the stage of hedonism tends to yield to the lure of the grandiose. It was not man, the individual, nor even the Supreme Being, that Robespierre set up against Christ; it was that Leviathan, the Nation.

In a Balkan country, not so many years ago, a party which had been beaten by a narrow margin in a general election retrieved its fortunes by shooting a sufficient number of the representatives of the other side to give it a majority. . . . Cromwell and Robespierre . . . acted likewise.