Robespierre: You constantly allege the declaration of human rights, the principles of liberty, and you yourselves believed in it so little that you constitutionally decreed slavery. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5391
Robespierre: The law, the public authority: is it not established to protect weakness against injustice and oppression? It is thus an offence to all social principles place it entirely in the hands of the rich. But the rich, the powerful, have reasoned differently, Through a strange abuse of words, they have restricted the general idea of property to certain objects only; they have called only themselves property owners: they have claimed that only property owners were worthy of the name of citizen; they have named their own particular interest the general interest, and to ensure the success of that claim, they have seized all social power. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5392
Robespierre: What is a person who, among men equal in rights, dares to declare his fellows unworthy of exercising theirs, and to take them away for his own advantage! https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5393
Robespierre: The people only ask for what is necessary, it only wants justice and tranquility, the rich aspire to everything, they want to invade and dominate everything. Abuses are the work and the domain of the rich, they are the scourges of the people: the interest of the people is the general interest, that of the rich is a particular interest. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5394
Robespierre: England! Ha! What good are they to you, England and its depraved constitution, which may have looked free to you when you had sunk to the lowest degree of servitude, but which it is high time to stop praising out of ignorance or habit! https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5395
Robespierre: I defy the most scrupulous defender of property to contest these principles, short of declaring openly that he understands this word as the right to despoil and assassinate his fellows. So how have people been able to claim that any sort of restriction, or rather any regulation of the trade in wheat, was an attack on property, and disguise that barbaric system under the specious name of freedom of trade? Do the authors of this system not perceive that they are inevitably in contradiction with themselves? https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5397
Robespierre: No doubt if all men were just and virtuous; if cupidity were never tempted to devour the people’s substance; if the rich, receptive to the voices of reason and nature, regarded themselves as the bursars of society, or as brothers to the poor, it might be possible to recognize no law but the most unlimited freedom; but if it is true that avarice can speculate on the misery and tyranny itself on the despair of the people; if it is true that all the passions declare war on suffering humanity, then why should not the law repress these abuses? Why should it not stay the homicidal hand of the monopolist, as it does that of the common murderer? Why should it not concern itself with the subsistence of the people, after caring so long for the pleasures of the great, and the power of despots? https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5398
Robespierre: The resources necessary to man are as sacred as life itself. Everything that is indispensable for its preservation is a property common to all of society. Only the surplus is private property and is abandoned to the industry of merchants. Any mercantile speculation that I make at the cost of the life of my countrymen is not trade, but brigandage and fratricide. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5399
Robespierre: It is a gross contradiction to suppose that the constitution might preside over this new order of things; that would be to assume it had itself survived. What are the laws that replace it? Those of nature, the one which is the foundation of society itself: the salvation of the people. The right to punish the tyrant and the right to dethrone him are the same thing; both include the same forms. The tyrant’s trial is the insurrection; the verdict, the collapse of his power; the sentence, whatever the liberty of the people requires. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5400
Robespierre: When the government violates the people’s rights, insurrection is, for the people and each portion of the people, the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5402
Robespierre: Offences committed by people’s representatives should be severely and promptly punished. No one has the right to claim to be more inviolable than other citizens. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5403
Robespierre: Ask that merchant in human flesh what property is. He will tell you, pointing to the long coffin that he calls a ship and in which he has herded and shackled men who still appear to be alive: “Those are my property; I bought them at so much a head.” Question that nobleman, who has lands and ships or who thinks that the world has been turned upside down since he has had none, and he will give you a similar view of property. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5405
Robespierre: Citizens whose incomes do not exceed what is required for their subsistence are exempted from contributing to state expenditure; all others must support it progressively according to their wealth. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5406
Robespierre: We want, in a word, to fulfil nature’s wishes, to further the destinies of humanity, to keep the promises of philosophy, to absolve providence of the long reign of crime and tyranny. So that France, once illustrious among enslaved countries, eclipsing the glory of all the free peoples that have existed, may become the model for all nations, the terror of oppressors, the consolation of the oppressed, the ornament of the universe. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5407
Robespierre: Democracy is a state in which the sovereign people, guided by laws which are its own work, does for itself all that it can do properly, and through delegates all that it cannot do for itself. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5408
Lenin: Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers' cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5409
Lenin: And although these magnificent uprisings of the working class were crushed, there will be another uprising, which the forces of the enemies of the proletariat will prove ineffective, and from which the socialist proletariat will emerge completely victorious. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5411
Carroll Quigley: The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5412
Lenin: During periods of industrial boom, the profits of finance capital are immense, but during periods of depression, small and unsound businesses go out of existence, and the big banks acquire “holdings” in them by buying them up for a mere song, or participate in profitable schemes for their “reconstruction” and “reorganisation”. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5413
Murray Rothbard: Now if a parent may own his child... then he may... give the child out for adoption, or he may sell the rights to the child in a voluntary contract. In short, we must face the fact that the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5415
Melita Norwood: I did what I did not to make money but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had, at great cost, given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education and a health service. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5416
