Talk:Maximilien Robespierre

This quote seems dubious:

• "Pity is treason."
  • Original French: "La pitié c'est la trahison." Speech to the National Convention, Paris, February 26, 1794.

I found no Robespierre speech dated February 26, but that very day Saint-Just said: "C'est un signe éclatant de trahison, que la pitié que l'on fait paraître pour le crime, dans une République qui ne peut être assise que sur l’inflexibilité." David Sneek 16:22, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Unsourced

Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable, precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to Maximilien Robespierre. --Antiquary 18:03, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

• Omelettes are not made without breaking eggs.
  • Original French: On ne peut pas faire d'omelette sans casser des oeufs.

• When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.

• Is it to be thought unreasonable that the people, in atonement for wrongs of a century, demand the vengeance of a single day?

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

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

• In the system of the French revolution that which is immoral is impolitic, and what tends to corrupt is counter-revolutionary. Weaknesses, vices, prejudices are the road to monarchy.

• The warmth of zeal is not perhaps the most dangerous rock that we have to avoid; but rather that languour which ease produces and a distrust of our own courage.

• To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty. (5 February 1794)

• 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.