The Supreme Being has not decreed monarchy, nor aristocracy, nor wealth, nor slavery. He has decreed equality.
L'Être suprême n'a point décrété la royauté, l'aristocratie, la richesse, ni l'esclavage. Il a décrété l'égalité.
Politicians
Maximilien Robespierre
French revolutionary lawyer and statesman (1758-1794). A provincial barrister from Arras steeped in Rousseau, he rose as the most influential voice of the Jacobin left in the National Convention and led the Committee of Public Safety during the Reign of Terror (1793-94), which produced an estimated 16,000 to 40,000 executions. He simultaneously championed universal male suffrage, the abolition of slavery in the French colonies, and free public education. Known as "the Incorruptible" for his austere private life and refusal of all bribes, he was overthrown on 9 Thermidor and guillotined at thirty-six, becoming the dual symbol of revolutionary idealism and revolutionary terror.
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Maximilien Robespierre's Other Quotes
Terror is nothing other than justice — prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.
The mainspring of popular government in revolution is at once virtue and terror — virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless.
Whoever does not hate crime cannot love virtue.
To love justice and equality, the people need no great virtue; it is enough that they love themselves.
Related Quotes
Officials are not perpetually noble, and commoners are not perpetually base.
-- Mozi
Good sense is the most evenly distributed thing in the world.
-- René Descartes
The legal subordination of one sex to another is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement.
-- John Stuart Mill
Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.
-- John Locke
The universe is a machine for the making of gods.
-- Henri Bergson
In a secular state, citizens of faith as well as citizens without faith may mutually expect that in the political public sphere each side will learn to take the perspective of the other.
-- Jürgen Habermas