Joseph de Maistre Quotes

In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve.

Every country has the government it deserves.

Every individual or national degeneration is immediately revealed by a directly proportional degradation in language.

The great fault in women is to desire to be like men.

All grandeur, all power, and all subordination to authority rests on the executioner: he is the horror and the bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world and at that very moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple and society disappears.

To know how to wait. It is the great secret of success.

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.

Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not. People complain of the despotism of princes; they ought to complain of the despotism of man.

Man's destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing.

What is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction, but the opposite of a revolution.

We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a very real sense all is evil, since nothing is in its proper place.

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

The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death.

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

It is not the mediocrity of women's education which makes their weakness; it is their weakness which necessarily causes their mediocrity.

Christianity was preached by ignorant men and believed by servants, and that is why it resembles nothing ever known.

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.

There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.

Without doubt, God is the universal moving force, but each being is moved according to the nature that God has given it. God directs angels, men, animals, brute matter, in sum all created things, but each according to its nature: and man having been created free, he is led freely.

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: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life.

Every time that a man who is not an absolute fool presents you with a question he considers very problematic after giving it careful thought, distrust those quick answers that come to the mind of someone who has considered it only briefly or not at all. These answers are usually simplistic views lacking in consistency, which explain nothing, or which do not bear examination.

It is one of man's curious idiosyncrasies to create difficulties for the pleasure of resolving them.

We are all bound to the throne of the Supreme Being by a flexible chain which restrains without enslaving us. The most wonderful aspect of the universal scheme of things is the action of free beings under divine guidance.

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

Prejudice does not mean false ideas, but only ... opinions adopted before examination.