Quotes from ANSELME BELLEGARRIGUE

The organization of society is the slavery of individuals, and its disorganization brings freedom.

Yes, anarchy is order, government is civil war.

There always appears, on the ruins of tyranny, a man taller than the others, a man that everyone sees, that everyone listens to and this one is the master of rubble.

I am told that it is for my good that I am governed; however, as I give my money to be governed, it follows that it is for my good that I give my money, which is possible; but which nevertheless deserves to be checked.

I deny everything and affirm naught but myself: because the sole truth of which I have material and moral proof and tangible, comprehensible and intelligible evidence, the only real, startling, non-arbitrary truth not susceptible to interpretation, is myself. I am. There I have a positive fact. Everything else is abstraction and, in mathematics, would be designated as "x", and unknown quantity; and I need not trouble myself with it.

All these men who say that the people must govern themselves, really govern the people.

I still find it strange, incomprehensible, unnatural, inhuman, to devote oneself to the happiness of people whom one does not do not know; and I declare that I do not have the honor of being known to the men who govern me.

The Republic is to parties what the tree is to parasites; the parties are the vermin of the nations, and it is important not to forget that it is with the various pretensions of these political religionaires that we must march by jerks of revolutions in insurrections, and insurrections in state of siege, to lead periodically to the burial of the dead, and to the payment of revolutionary bills which are the bonuses granted by the imbecility of all to the audacity of a few.

So, like today, the government machine kept, as it does, the same cogs, and I can only change the hand that turns the crank.

I recognize that at the same time that I am a victim, I am also a fool. But my stupidity is due to my isolation, and that's why I say to my fellow citizens: Let's raise our heads; we only trust ourselves; let us say: let there be freedom, and freedom will be!

Let me govern myself, and I cannot fail in my instinct which is to seek my good.

When you ask the government for freedom, the stupidity of your petition is instant proof to the latter that you have no grasp of your rights.

It is necessary, either that the government devours the country, or that the country absorbs the government.

There is only one republic to which I belong, of which we are citizens, we, honest people, who do not aspire, but who pay for the irreverent national domesticity. The Republic is us, it is the real France, the exploitable and exploited material; the priest of all these frenzied republics, of all those parties that have the property of others for dreams and laziness for idols.

Up to now you have believed in the existence of tyrants. Well, you were mistaken. There are only slaves. Where none obeys, none commands.