Patrice Gueniffey

“When, on getting out of bed, a man does not know what to do and drags his boring existence from one place to the next; when, in contemplating the future, he always sees a dreadful monotony, every day resembling the other; when he asks himself: why was I created?, that man, in my opinion, is the most miserable of all. His body breaks down, his heart loses the energy so natural in man. How does it manage to exist, this empty heart? It is to lead the life of brutes with the moral faculties that are peculiar to our nature. How happy he would be did he not possess these faculties!”
― Patrice Gueniffey, Bonaparte: 1769-1802

“In the genesis of the myth, neither the role of fabrication nor that of propaganda should be exaggerated. Besides, the effectiveness of the latter generally depends on the consent of those to whom it is addressed; it does not have the power to govern minds, and even in the most authoritarian regimes it is to the police, rather than to propaganda, that the absence of any dissident voice must be attributed.”
― Patrice Gueniffey, Bonaparte: 1769-1802