“After the destruction of all the false principles, society will subsist, because it is founded upon necessity, the laws of which, older than Saturn, will rule when Prometheus shall have dethroned Jupiter.”
“I conclude that all the laws with which a minister swells his portfolio are vain documents that can neither make us live nor prevent us from living.”
“It is well-nigh a matter of indifference whether we are governed in one fashion or another, and ministers are imposing only by reason of their clothes and their carriages.”
“These assemblies [parliaments] will be founded upon the confused mediocrity of the multitude of which they will be the issue. They will revolve obscure and multiple thoughts. They will impose on the heads of the government the task of executing vague wishes, of which they will not have full consciousness themselves; and the ministers, less fortunate than the Œdipus of the fable, will be devoured, one after the other, by the hundred-headed Sphinx, for not having guessed the riddle of which the Sphinx herself did not know the answer. Their greatest hardship will be to resign themselves to impotence, to words instead of action. They will become rhetoricians, and very bad rhetoricians, since the talent which carried with it ever so little clarity would ruin them. They will be obliged to speak without saying anything, and the least stupid among them will be condemned to deceive more than the others. In this way the most intelligent will become the most contemptible. And, if there shall be some capable of arranging treaties, regulating finance, and supervising affairs, their ability will profit them nothing; for time will be lacking, and time is the stuff of great enterprises.”
Of the Army:
“I have observed that the trade the most natural to man is that of soldiering; it is the one towards which he is the most easily borne by his instincts and by his tastes, which are not all good. And apart from certain rare exceptions, of which I am one, man may be defined as an animal with a musket. Give him a handsome uniform and the hope of going to fight, he will be content.... The military condition has this also in keeping with human nature, that one is never forced to think therein; and it is clear that we were not made to think.”
“Thought is a disease peculiar to certain individuals, and could not be propagated without bringing about promptly the end of the species. Soldiers live in bands, and man is a sociable animal. They wear costumes of blue and white, blue and red, gray and blue, ribbons, plumes, and cockades; and these give them the same prestige with women that the cock has with the hen. They go forth marauding and to war; and man is naturally thieving, libidinous, destructive, and sensible to glory.”
“It is astounding, Tournebroche, my son, that war and the chase, the mere thought of which ought to overwhelm us with shame and remorse in recalling to us the miserable necessities
of our nature and our inveterate wickedness, should, on the contrary, serve as matter for the pride of men; that Christians should continue to honour the trade of butcher and headsman when it is hereditary in the family; and that, in a word, among civilised peoples the illustriousness of the citizens is measured by the quantity of murder and carnage they carry, so to speak, in their veins.”