Divine Violence Quotes

“Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.”
― Maximilien Robespierre

“A sensibility that wails almost exclusively over the enemies of liberty seems suspect to me. Stop shaking the tyrant's bloody robe in my face, or I will believe that you wish to put Rome in chains.”
― Maximilien Robespierre

“Divine violence expiates; it releases from guilt. It operates not by the destruction of bodies but by the destruction of the systems of laws or ethics that declare an action to be right or wrong.”
― Ted Smith, Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics

“In the wake of divine violence...the commandment [to not kill] 'exists not as a criterion of judgement, but as a guideline for the actions of the persons or communities who have to wrestle it in solitude and, in monstrous cases, to take on themselves the responsibility to abstain from it'. Divine violence offers not legitimation but renewed occasions for responsibility. It breaks the binding obligations of an order that lets a person evade responsibility by saying, 'I am just following the law'- whether that law is rooted in the legal means of positive law or the just ends of natural law. Divine violence forces free action. It demands responsibility.”
― Ted Smith, Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics