“Let Revolutionists be Romans, not Tatars.”
Speech to the National Convention (March 17, 1794). [Source: Saint-Just quoted in Eugene N. Curtis, Saint-Just: Colleague of Robespierre (New York: Octagon Books, 1973), p. 228]
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Louis Antoine de Saint-Just 25
military and political leader 1767–1794Related quotes
“A revolutionist is born, not made.”
Talks with Mussolini, interviewer Emil Ludwig, Boston: MA, Little, Brown and Company, 1933, p. 66. Interview took place between March 23 and April 4, 1932
1930s
“The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it.”
Spoken to police immediately prior to his arrest at the Lincoln Hotel Restaurant in Chicago (August 1968), quoting himself in "Creating the Perfect Mess" (1 September 1968) in Revolution for the Hell of It (1968); also quoted in Abbie Hoffman : American Rebel (1992) by Marty Jezer.
Source: Steal This Book
Context: The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it. The second duty is to eat breakfast. I ain't going.
Our First Ambassador to China (Biography, 1908)
“A great revolution is hardest of all on the great revolutionists.”
“The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p. 67
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)
Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 451
Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XXXII : Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret
Context: To organize Anarchy, is the problem which the revolutionists have and will eternally have to resolve. It is the rock of Sisyphus that will always fall back upon them. To exist a single instant, they are and always will be by fatality reduced to improvise a despotism without other reason of existence than necessity, and which, consequently, is violent and blind as Necessity. We escape from the harmonious monarchy of Reason, only to fall under the irregular dictatorship of Folly.
Sometimes superstitious enthusiasms, sometimes the miserable calculations of the materialist instinct have led astray the nations, and God at last urges the world on toward believing Reason and reasonable Beliefs.
We have had prophets enough without philosophy, and philosophers without religion; the blind believers and the skeptics resemble each other, and are as far the one as the other from the eternal salvation.
“Let us ease the Roman people of their continual care, who think it long to await the death of an old man.”
Liberemus diuturna cura populum Romanum, quando mortem senis exspectare longum censent. (Latin, not original language)
Last words according to Livy "ab urbe condita", Book XXXIX, 51.
“I have been through a revolution, and I am convinced that I am no revolutionist.”
Diary entry (28 June 1921).
The Diary and Letters of Käthe Kollwitz (1955)
Context: I have been through a revolution, and I am convinced that I am no revolutionist. My childhood dreams of dying on the barricades will hardly be fulfilled, because I should hardly mount a barricade now that I know what they were like in reality. And so I know now what an illusion I lived in for so many years. I thought I was a revolutionary and was only an evolutionary. Yes, sometimes I do not know whether I am a socialist at all, whether I am not rather a democrat instead. How good it is when reality tests you to the guts and pins you relentlessly to the very position you always thought, so long as you clung to your illusion, was unspeakably wrong.
The Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/printarticle.aspx?id=544708 (10 March 2018)
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