Joseph de Maistre Quotes
Joseph-Marie, Count de Maistre, was a Savoyard lawyer, diplomat, and political philosopher and one of the most powerful counter-Enlightenment voices of the early nineteenth century. Driven from his homeland by the French revolutionary armies, he served as Sardinian ambassador to St Petersburg from 1803 to 1817, where he wrote most of his major works. The quotes below are attributed to Joseph de Maistre, organized by topic.
Browse Joseph de Maistre by topic
Joseph de Maistre on Freedom
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Attributed to Joseph de Maistre:
“Man is too wicked to be free.”
Joseph de Maistre on God
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“The wiser nations are, the more public spirit they possess, the more perfect their political constitution, the fewer constitutional laws they have, for these laws are only props, and a building only needs props when it has become out of plumb or when it has been violently shaken by an external force. The most perfect constitution of antiquity was without contradiction that of Sparta, and Sparta has not left us a single line of its public law. It justly boasted of having written its laws only in the hearts of its children.”
p. 84 -
“Government is a true religion : it has its dogmas, its mysteries, and its ministers. To annihilate it or submit it to the discussion of each individual is the same thing; it lives only through national reason, that is to say through political faith , which is a creed .”
p. 87
Joseph de Maistre on Happiness
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“Creating difficulties for himself for the pleasure of resolving them is a strange human mania.”
p. 48
Joseph de Maistre on Knowledge
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“To know the nature of man, the most direct and wisest way undoubtedly is to know what he has always been. Since when can theories be opposed to facts? History is experimental politics; this is the best or rather the only good politics.”
p. 21 -
“Nations are barbarian in their infancy but not savage. The barbarian is a proportional mean between the savage and the citizen. He already possesses no end of knowledge: he has habitations, some agriculture, domestic animals, laws, a cult, regular tribunals; he lacks only the sciences .”
p. 25
Joseph de Maistre on Mind
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“Man is an enigma whose knot has not ceased to occupy observers. The contradictions that he contains astonish reason and impose silence on it. So what is this inconceivable being who carries within him powers that clash and who is obliged to hate himself in order to esteem himself?”
Wikiquote
Joseph de Maistre on Nature
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“Burke said with a depth that it is impossible to admire enough that art is man’s nature : yes, undoubtedly, man with all his affections, all his knowledge, all his arts, is truly the man of nature, and the weaver’s web is as natural as the spider’s.”
p. 52 -
“If sovereignty is not anterior to a people, at least these two ideas are collateral, since it takes a sovereign to make a people. It is as impossible to imagine a human society without a sovereign as a hive and a swarm without a queen, for a swarm, in virtue of the eternal laws of nature, exists in this way or it does not exist.”
p. 53
Joseph de Maistre on Politics
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“Every nation has the government it deserves.”
Original text: Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite. | Letter 76, on the topic of Russia's new constitutional laws (27 August 1811); published in Lettres et Opuscules . The English translation has several variations, including "Every country has the government it deserves" and "In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve." The quote is popularly misattributed to better-known commen -
Attributed to Joseph de Maistre:
“Where there is no judge, there is no political society.”
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Attributed to Joseph de Maistre:
“The hangman is the foundation of social order.”
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Attributed to Joseph de Maistre:
“Reason cannot govern the world; only authority can.”
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“All grandeur, all power, all subordination, rest on the executioner.”
First Dialogue," p. 20 -
“In the Koran as in the Bible , politics is divinized, and human reason, crushed by the religious ascendancy, cannot insinuate its isolating and corrosive poison into the mechanisms of government, so that citizens are believers whose loyalty is exalted to faith , and obedience to enthusiasm and fanaticism .”
p. 78
Joseph de Maistre on Virtue
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“Men never respect what they have made themselves. This is why an elective king never possesses the moral power of a hereditary sovereign, because he is not noble enough, that is to say he does not possess that kind of greatness independent of men and that is the work of time .”
p. 72