Revolutionary Justice Quotes

Comrades! The revolt by the five kulak administrative regions must be suppressed without mercy. The interest of the entire revolution demands this, because we have now before us the "final decisive battle" against the kulaks. We need to set an example. You need to hang (most definitely hang, so that the public sees) at least 100 notorious kulaks, the rich, the bloodsuckers. This needs to be accomplished in such a way, that people for hundreds of miles around will see, tremble, know and scream out: let's choke and strangle those blood-sucking kulaks. Telegraph us acknowledging receipt and execution of this. Yours, Lenin…. P.S. Find some of the tougher people for this.

My machine [the guillotine] will take off a head in a twinkling and the victim will feel nothing but a refreshing coolness. We cannot make too much haste, gentlemen, to allow the nation to enjoy this advantage.

All counter-revolutionary wars are unjust, all revolutionary wars are just.

His [Lenin’s] love of the proletariat was the same despotic, exacting, and merciless love with which, centuries ago, Torquemada burned people for their salvation.

The existing system will be quickest and most radically overthrown by the annihilation of its exponents. Therefore, massacres of the enemies of the people must be set in motion.

When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use.

When the Constituent Assembly engaged men of letters to research the penal code in order to repeal the death penalty, even for the condemned, did they imagine that after four years of a revolution enlightened by philosophical ideals, the French would, without cease, kill their fellow citizens?

In a few days, I will have them all guillotined in Paris.

The guillotine governs.

There are revolutionary committees that practice revolutionary violence, and anyone who opposes the will of the people will have to be chased. Anyone who is opposed to the will of the people becomes a foe of the people. The duty of the revolutionary committee is to practice revolutionary violence against the enemies of the revolution.

So long as danger threatened from without public opinion tolerated the guillotine.

Henceforth we will tackle our enemies that come face to face with us and we will not be stabbed in from behind by internal foes... To this end, we will arm the allies and comrades of the broad masses without giving respite to reactionaries, and avenge the blood of our comrades double - and triple - fold.

[In the French Revolution] there is much to approve and much to condemn…. An essential change was necessary for the happiness and dignity of a great people, long in a state of degradation.

I had rather be guillotined than a guillotiner.

Terror is only justice: prompt, severe and inflexible. It is then an emanation of virtue.

After the French Revolution, it was not the treason of the king that was in question; it was the existence of the king. You have to be very careful when you judge and execute somebody for being a symbol.

Condemn me, it does not matter: history will absolve me.

The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral.

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.

I've always found the rhetoric of mainstream civil rights leaders and organizations to be far too timid, accommodationist, and gradualist. It always seemed to me that they behaved like meek and gentle supplicants begging the oppressor for a few crumbs of justice, for a few molecules of citizenship rights.

No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies!

The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.

The “terror” of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.

Every war has revolutionary justice.

Our comrades are languishing in prison: amnesty cannot reach them, and we don’t want amnesty for them. We want them released by the industrial might of the proletariat, by class conscious action.