Joseph de Maistre

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

“Every country has the government it deserves.”

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

“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.”

“War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world. War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular. War is divine in the my...”

“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 kingd...”

“Man is so muddled, so dependent on the things immediately before his eyes, that every day even the most submissive believer can be seen to risk the torments of the afterlife for the smallest...”

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

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

“No man has ceased to believe in God before having decided that he should not exist; no book would produce atheism, and no book can restore faith.”

“I don't know what a scoundrel is like, but I know what a respectable man is like, and it's enough to make one's flesh creep.”

“Man, in spite of his fatal degradation, bears always the evident marks of his divine origin, in that every universal belief is always more or less true.”

“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...”

“There is no man who desires as passionately as a Russian. If we could imprison a Russian desire beneath a fortress, that fortress would explode.”

“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.”

“In the works of man, everything is as poor as its author; vision is confined, means are limited, scope is restricted, movements are labored, and results are humdrum.”

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

“There is no philosophy without the art of ignoring objections.”

“All pain is a punishment, and every punishment is inflicted for love as much as for justice.”

“Man may well have covered over and, so to speak, encrusted the truth with the errors he has loaded onto it, but these errors are local, and universal truth will always show itself.”