"A constitution that is made for all nations is made for none."
- Joseph de Maistre
"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 mysterious g..."
"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 fin..."
"Ephemeral spectator of an eternal spectacle, man raises for a second his eyes to Heaven, and closes them for ever; but, during that rapid second that is granted to him, from all the quarters of Heaven..."
- Xavier de Maistre
"[M]an cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished without being guilty. In short … there is nothing so intrinsically plausib..."
"All sciences have their mysteries and at certain points the apparently most obvious theory will be found in contradiction with experience. Politics, for example, offers several proofs of this truth. I..."
"Human reason reduced to its own resources is perfectly worthless, not only for creating but also for preserving any political or religious association, because it only produces disputes, and, to condu..."