The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.
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High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor, only to be surpassed by his successor. Without this relay race called history there would be no European art and what characterizes it: a longing for originality, a longing for change. Robespierre, Napoleon, Beethoven, Stalin, Picasso, they're all runners in the relay race, they all belong to the same stadium.
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Peter the Hermit, Calvin, and Robespierre, sons of the same soil, at intervals of three centuries were, in a political sense, the levers of Ar...
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Robespierre, this pedant of freedom!
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Is it to be thought unreasonable that the people, in atonement for wrongs of a century, demand the vengeance of a single day?
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Pity is treason.
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When a banker jumps out of a window, jump after him -- that's where the money is.
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