“As long as truths do not cut into our flesh with knives, we retain a secret contempt for them.”
—Daybreak, §460 (excerpt).
—Daybreak, §460 (excerpt).
Nothing resists, nothing can resist the force that drags man into conflict; an innocent murderer, a passive instrument in a formidable hand, he plunges unseeing into the abyss he himself has dug; he dies without suspecting that it is he himself who has brought about his death.
Thus is worked out, from maggots up to man, the universal law of the violent destruction of living beings. The whole earth, continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death.
- Joseph de Maistre, St. Petersburg dialogues (1815)
Thus is worked out, from maggots up to man, the universal law of the violent destruction of living beings. The whole earth, continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death.
- Joseph de Maistre, St. Petersburg dialogues (1815)