Charles Peguy Quotes

Charles Peguy offers witty, thought-provoking reflections on history, change, and friendship.

18 quotes

1. Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.

2. It is impossible to write ancient history because we do not have enough sources and impossible to write modern history because we have too many.

3. The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors.

4. The world has changed more in the last thirty years than it has since Jesus Christ.

5. When I see my best friend coming I do not say to myself 'How am I going to manage propagandizing him?'

6. The man who wishes to remain faithful to justice must make himself continually unfaithful to inexhaustibly triumphant injustice.

7. Any father whose son raises his hand against him is guilty of having produced a son who raised his hand against him.

8. Freedom is a system based on courage.

9. A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

10. Homer is new this morning, and perhaps nothing is as old as today's newspaper.

11. He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.

12. There will be things that I do that no one will be left to understand.

13. The faith that I love the best, says God, is hope.

14. One has not the right to betray even a traitor. Traitors must be fought, got betrayed.

15. We said that a single injustice, a single crime, a single illegality, particularly if it is officially recorded, confirmed, a single wrong to humanity, a single wrong to justice and to right, particularly if it is universally, legally, nationally, commodiously accepted, that a single crime shatters and is sufficient to shatter the whole social pact, the whole social contract, that a single legal crime, a single dishonorable act will bring about the loss of ones honor, the dishonor of a whole people. It is a touch of gangrene that corrupts the entire body.

16. When you love someone you love him as he is.

17. It is better to have a war for justice than peace in injustice.

18. The life of an honest man must be a perpetual infidelity.