Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

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

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

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

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

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

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

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

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

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

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

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.

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

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

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

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

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

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

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

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.

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

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.

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

A nation regenerates itself only upon heaps of corpses.

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

The Revolution is frozen; all its principles are weakened; there remains only red caps worn by intriguers. The exercise of terror has made crime blasé, as strong liquors made the palace blasé.

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

What produces the general good is always terrible or seems bizarre when begun too soon ... The Revolution must stop itself at the perfection of public happiness and liberty through the laws.

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

When human statecraft attaches a chain to the feet of a free man, whom it makes a slave in contempt of nature and citizenship, eternal justice rivets the other end about the tyrant's neck.

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

The French people recognize the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. The first day of every month is to be dedicated to the eternal.

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

In every Revolution a dictator is needed to save the state by force, or censors to save it by virtue.

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

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!

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

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

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

Happiness is a new idea in Europe.

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

Let Revolutionists be Romans, not Tatars.

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

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.

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

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

— Louis Antoine de Saint-Just