All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.
State censorship presents itself as a bulwark between society and forces of subversion or moral corruption. To dismiss this account of its own motives by the state as insincere would be a mistake: it is a feature of the paranoid logic of the censoring mentality that virtue... must be innocent, and therefore, unless protected, vulnerable to the wiles of vice.
You who make the laws, the vices and the virtues of the people will be your work.
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.
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.
The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.
Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.
The song that nerves a nation's heart
Is in itself a deed.
The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.
Human beings are social animals. We were social before we were human.