"Citizens, by what illusion could one persuade himself that you are inhuman. Your Revolutionary Tribunal has condemned three hundred rascals to death in a year. Has not the Spanish Inquisition done worse than that ... Have the English assizes butchered no one in that period? ... What of the kings of Europe, does anyone prate to them of pity? Ah, do not allow yourselves to grow soft-hearted!"

"Dare! — this word contains all the politics of our revolution."

"Happiness is a new idea in Europe."

"Let Revolutionists be Romans, not Tatars."

"It is not enough, citizens, to have destroyed the factions, it is necessary now to repair the evil that they have done to the country."

"I am not of any faction, I will fight them all."

"You who make the laws, the vices and the virtues of the people will be your work."

"Every political edict which is not based upon nature is wrong."

"Peace and prosperity, public virtue, victory, everything is in the vigor of the laws. Outside of the laws everything is sterile and dead."

"When a people, having become free, establish wise laws, their revolution is complete."

"In the circumstances in which the Republic finds itself, the constitution cannot be inaugurated; it would destroy itself ... The provisional government of France is revolutionary until there is peace."

"The legislator commands the future; to be feeble will avail him nothing: it is for him to will what is good and to perpetuate it; to make man what he desires to be: for the laws, working upon the social body, which is inert in itself, can produce either virtue or crime, civilized customs or savagery."

"Most arts have produced miracles, while the art of government has produced nothing but monsters."

"I have not found a single good man in government; I have found good only in the people."

"It has always seemed to me that the social order was implicit in the very nature of things, and required nothing more from the human spirit than care in arranging the various elements; that a people could be governed without being made thralls or libertines or victims thereby; that man was born for peace and liberty, and became miserable and cruel only through the action of insidious and oppressive laws. And I believe therefore that if man be given laws which harmonize with the dictates of nature and of his heart he will cease to be unhappy and corrupt."

"Those who make revolutions by halves do nothing but dig their own tombs."

"It is time that we labored for the happiness of the people. Legislators who are to bring light and order into the world must pursue their course with inexorable tread, fearless and unswerving as the sun."

"One cannot reign innocently: the insanity of doing so is evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper."