French Revolution Quotes - Page 4

• Democracy, thus French revolution, was not invented by philosophic theory nor by the bourgeois leadership. It was discovered by the masses in their method of action.

  Raya Dunayevskaya

  Democracy, Revolution, Action

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• 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

  Scandal, Today, Revolution

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Government, People, Excess

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• We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive- and a few are enough to carry on.

  H. L. Mencken

  War, Thinking, Break Through

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• To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

  Oscar Wilde

  Hands, Ordinary, Bags

  Oscar Wilde (1899). “The Importance of Being Earnest”, p.38

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• The Africans were oftentimes allied with the antagonist of the Republic. Now, you may want to step back and ask yourself why that might be. It may lead you to a reconsideration of the origins of the nation now known as the United States of America. As opposed to seeing it in the same vein as the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution, you might see it in the same vein as the revolt against British rule in Rhodesia in 1965, and, if so, that might help to shed light on why conservatism is so deeply entrenched in this republic.

  Gerald Horne

  Light, America, Veins

  Source: politicalaffairs.net

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• 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

  Christian, Roots, Achievement

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• All men now allow that if any human power could have stemmed the avalanche of the French Revolution, it would have been the reforms of Turgot.

  Evelyn Beatrice Hall

  Men, Reform, Avalanches

  "The Friends of Voltaire". Book by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, 1906.

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

  Julius Evola

  Principles, Revolution, Normal

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• The French Revolution, Fichte's Theory of Knowledge, and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister are the three greatest tendencies of the age. Whoever takes offence at this combination, and whoever does not consider a revolution important unless it is blatant and palpable, has not yet risen to the lofty and broad vantage point of the history of mankind.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  History, Important, Age

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• From 1789, perhaps even before that, it had been the willingness of politicians to exploit either the threat or the fact of violence that had given them the power to challenge constituted authority. Bloodshed was not the unfortunate by product of revolution, it was the source of energy.

  Simon Schama

  Challenges, Violence, Revolution

  Simon Schama (2004). “Citizens: A Chronicle of The French Revolution”, p.728, Penguin UK

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• 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

  Real, Europe, People

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• I bold it impossible, that the great monarchies of Europe can subsist much longer; they all affect magnificence and splendor.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Thinking, Europe, Lasts

  "Émilius, Or, A Treatise on Education".

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• I shall easily show that it is impossible to tax further, ruinous to be always borrowing and not enough to confine ourselves to measures of economy.

  Charles Alexandre de Calonne

  Revolution, Impossible, Enough

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• What is this much repeated phrase 'active citizen' supposed to mean? The active citizens are the ones who took the Bastille.

  Camille Desmoulins

  Mean, Citizens, Phrases

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• Father Col, an intrepid defender of the Faith during the French Revolution and the pastor of Bourg-d'Oisans where these good people were married [M/M Eymard], had foretold to them that they would have a son who would become a priest and founder of the Order of the Blessed Sacrament. During the months she bore Peter Julian, Mrs. Eymard used to visit the parish church and offer him to the hidden God of the tabernacle.

  Peter Julian Eymard

  Father, Blessed, Son

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• 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

  Writing, Historical Novels, Years

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• [We need] someone bold, to put himself at the head of the disaffected and rally them against the oppressor. Some great character who could captivate the people... someone wise who could direct the actions of an unbridled and floating multitude.

  Jean-Paul Marat

  Wise, Character, People

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

  Georges Danton

  Safety, Balls, Legs

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• 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

  Integrity, Real, Lying

  "Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent". Book by Robert F. Barsky, 1997.

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• 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.

  Isak Dinesen

  Dream, Taken, Heart

  Isak Dinesen (1938). “Out of Africa”

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• The Messianic era is the present age, which began to germinate with the teachings of Spinoza, and finally came into historical existence with the great French Revolution.

  Moses Hess

  Teaching, Historical, Age

  Moses Hess (1943). “The Revival of Israel: Rome and Jerusalem, the Last Nationalist Question”, p.138, U of Nebraska Press

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• 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

  Kings, Thinking, Rights

  Margaret Thatcher, Iain Dale (1997). “As I said to Denis--: the Margaret Thatcher book of quotations”, Robson Book Ltd

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• 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

  Running, Men, Years

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

  J. Christopher Herold

  War, Mistake, Tyrants

  "Napoleon".

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