Quote #23
To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.
More from Maximilien Robespierre
- The warmth of zeal is not perhaps the most dangerous rock that we have to avoid; but rather that languour which ease produces and a distrus…
- What is the end of our revolution? The tranquil enjoyment of liberty and equality; the reign of that eternal justice, the laws of which are…
- The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.
- The attribute of popular government in a revolution is at one and the same time virtue and terror. Virtue without terror is fatal; terror w…
- In the system of the French revolution that which is immoral is impolitic, and what tends to corrupt is counter-revolutionary. Weaknesses, …
- Crime butchers innocence to secure a throne, and innocence struggles with all its might against the attempts of crime.
- Atheism is aristocratic; the idea of a great Being that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is altogether popula…
- Any law which violates the inseparable rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.