Historical voices

This same wealth, which is at all times treason and lèze-nation to indigent and rapacious despotism, under all modes of polity, was your temptation to violate property, law, and religion, united in one object.

Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart, nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.

The power which was above all fear and all remorse was not set above all shame.

I can say nothing in praise of those acts of tyranny, which no voice has hitherto ever commended under any of their false colors; yet in these false colors an homage was paid by despotism to justice.

Had fate reserved him to our times, four technical terms would have done his business, and saved him all this trouble; he needed nothing more than one short form of incantation:--"Philosophy, Light, Liberality, the Rights of Men.

With you, in your improved state of the human mind, there was no such formality.

They were driven beyond all bounds of moderation by the apprehension of the return of power with the return of property to the families of those they had injured beyond all hope of forgiveness.

It must be allowed in favor of those tyrants of antiquity, that what was done by them could hardly be said to be done in cold blood.

Few barbarous conquerors have ever made so terrible a revolution in property.

He does not deserve the name of a free man who will not express them.

Can one hear of the proscription of such persons, and the confiscation of their effects, without indignation, and horror?

Nothing can lead more to the true spirit of the Assembly, which sits for public confiscation with its new equity and its new morality, than an attention to their proceeding with regard to this debt of the clergy.

But by the new institute of the rights of men, the only persons who in equity ought to suffer are the only persons who are to be saved harmless: those are to answer the debt who neither were lenders nor borrowers, mortgagers nor mortgagees.

All the envy against wealth and power was artificially directed against other descriptions of riches.

They served as a link to unite, in favor of one object, obnoxious wealth to restless and desperate poverty.

These writers, like the propagators of all novelties, pretended to a great zeal for the poor and the lower orders, whilst in their satires they rendered hateful, by every exaggeration, the faults of courts, of nobility, and of priesthood.

To those who have observed the spirit of their conduct it has long been clear that nothing was wanted but the power of carrying the intolerance of the tongue and of the pen into a persecution which would strike at property, liberty, and…

The resources of intrigue are called in to supply the defects of argument and wit.

These atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own; and they have learnt to talk against monks with the spirit of a monk.

I will venture to say that this narrow, exclusive spirit has not been less prejudicial to literature and to taste than to morals and true philosophy.

This was true liberality; which they returned by endeavoring to confine the reputation of sense, learning, and taste to themselves or their followers.

The world had done them justice, and in favor of general talents forgave the evil tendency of their peculiar principles.

To command that opinion, the first step is to establish a dominion over those who direct it.

It is therefore the kind of wealth which will be resorted to by all who wish for change.