“The revolutionary government is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.”
Act I.
Dantons Tod (Danton's Death) (1835)
“The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.”
Original: (fr) Le gouvernement de la révolution est le despotisme de la liberté contre la tyrannie.
Source: Speech to the National Convention http://www.royet.org/nea1789-1794/archives/discours/robespierre_principes_morale_politique_05_02_94.htm (5 February 1794)
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Maximilien Robespierre 78
French revolutionary lawyer and politician 1758–1794Related quotes
“Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.”
Source: Democracy in America, Volume I (1835), Chapter XV-IXX, Chapter XVII.
Context: Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity?
Thomas Jefferson
(1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
First attributed to Jefferson in 1945, this does not appear in any known Jefferson document. When governments fear the people, there is liberty... http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/When_governments_fear_the_people,_there_is_liberty...(Quotation), Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia. It first appears in 1914, in [Barnhill, John Basil, John Basil Barnhill, Indictment of Socialism No. 3, Barnhill-Tichenor Debate on Socialism, http://debs.indstate.edu/b262b3_1914.pdf, PDF, 2008-10-16, 1914, National Rip-Saw Publishing, Saint Louis, Missouri, p. 34]
Misattributed
Variant: Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty.
George Mason
(1725–1792) American delegate from Virginia to the U.S. Constitutional Convention
Article 12
Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776)
Indictment of Socialism (#3) http://debs.indstate.edu/b262b3_1914.pdf, transcript of Barnhill-Tichenor Debate on Socialism (1914)
This quote is often erroneously attributed to Thomas Jefferson
“All government, of course, is against liberty.”
H.L. Mencken
(1880–1956) American journalist and writer
Preface
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)
“We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.”
Thomas Jefferson
(1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
Letter to Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette (2 April 1790)
1790s
Thomas Jefferson
(1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
According to the Jefferson Library, this is among the many statements misattributed to Jefferson. http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Category:Spurious_Quotations
Misattributed