Historical voices

From that moment we have no compass to govern us, nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer.

When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated.

Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

The usurpation, which, in order to subvert ancient institutions, has destroyed ancient principles, will hold power by arts similar to those by which it has acquired it.

But power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which manners and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for its support.

To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

These public affections, combined with manners, are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law.

But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place.

On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons,--so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment.

The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father, are only common homicide,--and if the people are by any chance or in any way gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and into which we ought not to make too…

Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity.

On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman, a woman is but an animal,--and an animal not of the highest order.

All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own…

All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off.

All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which by a bland assimilation incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society…

Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination, vanquisher of laws, to…

It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by…

The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone!

Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom!

That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.

I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

Oh! what a revolution! and what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall!

I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,--glittering like the morning-star, full of life and splendor and joy.

As a man, it became him to feel for his wife and his children, and the faithful guards of his person that were massacred in cold blood about him; as a prince, it became him to feel for the strange and frightful transformation of his…