Joseph de Maistre

“All greatness, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association.”

“Every nation gets the government it deserves.”

“Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not.”

“False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.”

“War is divine in itself, since it is a law of the world.”

“Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free.”

“The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end.”

“I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be; I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.”

“Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.”

“It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.”

“In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom.”

“History is experimental politics.”

“The French Revolution is satanic in its essence.”

“A constitution that is made for all nations is made for none.”

“Man is a social animal, and the savage is not a man.”

“Every nation gets the government it deserves.”

“False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.”

“All grandeur, all power, all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association.”

“Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not.”

“War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world.”