Historical voices

I knew, indeed, that the sufferings of monarchs make a delicious repast to some sort of palates.

But History, who keeps a durable record of all our acts, and exercises her awful censure over the proceedings of all sorts of sovereigns, will not forget either those events, or the era of this liberal refinement in the intercourse of…

The anodyne draught of oblivion, thus drugged, is well calculated to preserve a galling wakefulness, and to feed the living ulcer of a corroding memory.

The members of your Assembly must themselves groan under the tyranny of which they have all the shame, none of the direction, and little of the profit.

Lovers of monarchy, lovers of republics, must alike abhor it.

Who is it that admires, and from the heart is attached to national representative assemblies, but must turn with horror and disgust from such a profane burlesque and abominable perversion of that sacred institute?

They have a power given to them, like that of the Evil Principle, to subvert and destroy,--but none to construct, except such machines as may be fitted for further subversion and further destruction.

The Assembly, their organ, acts before them the farce of deliberation with as little decency as liberty.

Embracing in their arms the carcasses of base criminals, and promoting their relations on the title of their offences, they drive hundreds of virtuous persons to the same end, by forcing them to subsist by beggary or by crime.

Liberty is always to be estimated perfect as property is rendered insecure.

Tenderness to individuals is considered as treason to the public.

Humanity and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance.

In these meetings of all sorts, every counsel, in proportion as it is daring and violent and perfidious, is taken for the mark of superior genius.

It is beyond doubt, that, under the terror of the bayonet, and the lamp-post, and the torch to their houses, they are obliged to adopt all the crude and desperate measures suggested by clubs composed of a monstrous medley of all…

It is notorious that all their measures are decided before they are debated.

There a majority, sometimes real, sometimes pretended, captive itself, compels a captive king to issue as royal edicts, at third hand, the polluted nonsense of their most licentious and giddy coffee-houses.

There must be a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouse the imagination, grown torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years' security, and the still unanimating repose of…

A cheap, bloodless reformation, a guiltless liberty, appear flat and vapid to their taste.

Plots, massacres, assassinations, seem to some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution.

They have perverted in themselves, and in those that attend to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast.

Without opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart.

This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature.

The worst of these politics of revolution is this: they temper and harden the breast, in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme occasions.

I am as incapable of that injustice as I am of keeping terms with those who profess principles of extremes, and who, under the name of religion, teach little else than wild and dangerous politics.