Quotes About Metternich

It is useless to close the gates against ideas; they overlap them.

In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.

Dictatorship is built around this confusion. Napoleon said he only desired the greatness of France, but he proclaimed to Metternich,11 "I don't give a damn if millions of men live or die.

Baron Otto von Bismarck-Schönhausen had just returned from St. Petersburg, where he had been Prussian ambassador. He was a conservative of the extreme type, hated and feared by the liberal and national party no less than Metternich. But no man better than he comprehended the policy of Austria, and all the complicated threads composing

Metternich objected to all such constitutions not merely because they were representative, and hence incompatible with absolutism, but also because they were national, and thus incompatible with the structure of the Austrian Empire. A national constitution, Metternich believed, would be the death of Austria.

Metternich employed two of his favorite devices in his attempt to meet the danger of anarchy and revolution toward which he insisted the current ministry was leading France. Through private correspondence with Decazes, he tried to convince the supple French premier that unless France altered her press and election laws in a conservative direction and otherwise imitated the policies of the Carlsbad decrees, the monarchy of Louis XVIII was doomed.