William Doyle > Quotes

“...those who succeeded the Voltaires, the d'Alemberts, & the Diderots at the head of the movement when these giants died, & who inherited their social acclaim, had little new to say...These swarming hacks hoped, like the great heroes of the Enlightenment before them, to write their way to fame & fortune. They found fame & fortune already monopolized by second-rate socialites who did not even put pen to paper most of the time, & yet who had the power & prestige to censor & condemn their works out of hand.”
― William Doyle, Origins of the French Revolution

“We will be paying more! ... No doubt; but who? Only those who were not paying enough; they will pay what they owe according to a just proportion, and nobody will be overburdened. Privileges will be sacrificed! … Yes: justice demands it, need requires it. Would it be better to put further burdens on the unprivileged, the people? There will be a great outcry! … That was to be expected. Can general good be done without bruising a few individual interests? Can there be reform without some complaints?8”
― William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution

“For the left, the terror had been cruel necessity, made inevitable by the determination of the enemies of liberty and the rights of man to strangle them at birth. For the right, the Revolution had been violent from the start in its commitment to destroying respect and reverence for order and religion.”
― William Doyle, The French Revolution: A Very Short Introduction

“By his early-twenties, John F. Kennedy was living one of the most extraordinary young American lives of the twentieth century. He traveled in an orbit of unprecedented wealth, influence, global mobility, and power. As a student and as diplomatic assistant to his father, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1938 to 1940, Kennedy journeyed to England, Ireland, France, Moscow, Berlin, Beirut, Damascus, Athens, and Turkey, pausing briefly from a vacation on the French Riviera to sleep with the actress Marlene Dietrich. He met with top White House officials and traveled to Cuba, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago, Peru, and Ecuador. He gambled in a casino in Monte Carlo; visited Naples, Capri, Milan, Florence, Venice, and Rome; rode a camel at the Great Pyramid at Giza; attended the coronation of Pope Pius XII; and witnessed a rally for Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. He recalled of these momentous years, 'It was a great opportunity to see a period of history which was one of the most significant.' In a visit to British-occupied Palestine, Kennedy recalled, 'I saw the rock where our Lord ascended into heaven in a cloud, and [in] the same area, I saw the place where Mohammed was carried up to heaven on a white horse.”
― William Doyle

“Privilege, that fundamental principle of social and institutional life since time immemorial, had been renounced. With it went the whole structure of provincial, local, and municipal government.”
― William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution

“Carried away by their own success and rhetoric, they now bade defiance to the whole of Europe. ‘They threaten you with kings!’ roared Danton to the Convention.3 ‘You have thrown down your gauntlet to them, and this gauntlet is a king’s head, the signal of their coming death.”
― William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution

“Enlightenment meant criticism, a belief that nothing was beyond rational improvement, and that nothing was justifiable that could not be shown to be useful to humanity, or to promote human happiness.”
― William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution

“The vast majority of French people who were not destitute lived under constant threat of becoming so, and were prepared to use violence to avoid such a fate. When they did, they terrified the narrow, secure social élites who in normal times dominated urban life and who never had to worry about the price of a four-pound loaf.”
― William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution

“The lot—and often indeed the aim—of most professional bourgeois was to vegetate in modest, undemanding, but comfortable circumstances, finding wives of similar background and being succeeded in their office or calling by their children and grandchildren”
― William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution

“Neither had any interest in compromise or conciliation.”
― William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution