Marquis Lafayette Quotes

Without Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence, there would have been no American revolution that announced universal principles of liberty. Without his participation by the side of the unforgettable Marquis de Lafayette, there would have been no French proclamation of The Rights of Man. Without his brilliant negotiation of the Louisiana treaty, there would be no United States of America. Without Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, there would have been no Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, and no basis for the most precious clause of our most prized element of our imperishable Bill of Rights - the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible of duties.

Washington had several surrogate sons during the Revolution, most notably the marquis de Lafayette, and he often referred to Hamilton as “my boy.

We’re immigrants. We get the job done. Alexander Hamilton to the Marquis de Lafayette me (at centre-stage)

Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country.

The happiness of America is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind; she is destined to become the safe and venerable asylum of virtue, of honesty, of tolerance, and quality and of peaceful liberty.

All that you are, all that I owe to you, justifies my love

If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the clergy.

I read, I study, I examine, I listen, I think, and out of all that I try to form an idea into which I put as much common sense as I can.

Insurrection is the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties

Thomas Jefferson helped the Marquis de Lafayette draft a declaration,” Simon blurts. “Mr. Spier, memorizing the Hamilton soundtrack is not going to save you on the AP Euro exam.

True republicanism is the sovereignty of the people. There are natural and imprescriptible rights which an entire nation has no right to violate.

When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is . . . the most indispensable of duties. -Marquis de Lafayette

Thomas Jefferson helped the Marquis de Lafayette draft a declaration," Simon blurts. "Mr. Spier, memorizing the Hamilton soundtrack is not going to save you on the AP Euro exam.

What safety is there, in a country where Robespierre is a sage, Danton an honest man, and Marat a God?

I read, I study, I examine, I listen, I reflect, and out of all of this I try to form an idea into which I put as much common sense as I can. I shall not speak much for fear of saying foolish things; I will risk still less for fear of doing them, for I am not disposed to abuse the confidence which they have deigned to show me. Such is the conduct which until now I have followed and will follow.

When I succeed everyone will applaud my efforts.” For anyone else, these might have been famous last words. For Lafayette, they were his opening lines.

For Lafayette, the proposal to purchase a plantation and set the slaves free was an extension of the courageous idealism that carried America into rebellion, revolution, and independence.

The commander in chief categorically rejected becoming a dictator, staging a coup, or ruling by force. This powerful example of political self-abnegation was one of the most important virtues Washington modeled for Lafayette.

Declaration of Independence: “That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”18 Lafayette took these words seriously. He believed them.

Cristina Belgiojoso, who was so close to Lafayette at the end of his life, watched Lafayette’s reputation tarnished by the hands of more cynical commentators like Chateaubriand. “When he is given his place in history,” she said in 1850, “it will be recognized, I am sure of this, that his political mistakes were caused by too high opinion of the human species and of men; he judged the latter according to himself. One can understand the serious errors he made in attributing to others the integrity, the uprightness, and the sincerity that were only in him.”57

Lafayette said to Mauroy, “Don’t you believe that the people are united by the love of virtue and liberty?” Mauroy replied the Americans were not some novel species, they were simply transplanted Europeans “who brought to a savage land the views and prejudices of their respective homelands.” He proceeded to give Lafayette a brief moral history of European colonization: “Fanaticism, the insatiable desire to get rich, and misery—those are, unfortunately, the three sources from which flow that nearly uninterrupted stream of immigrants who, sword in hand, go to cut down, under an alien sky, forests more ancient than the world, watering a still virgin land with the blood of its savage inhabitants, and fertilizing with thousands of scattered cadavers the fields they conquered through crime.”3 This, Mauroy informed Lafayette, was the reality of the “new world” toward which they sailed.

The happiness of America is intimately connected with the happiness of all mankind; she will become the safe and respected asylum of virtue, integrity, toleration, equality, and tranquil happiness.

The uncouth revolutionaries of the street once again made it possible for the polite salon revolutionaries to achieve their ends.

Marquis de Lafayette,

No one has more resilience or matches my practical, tactical brilliance!

There are natural and imprescriptible rights which an entire nation has no right to violate. —MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE

When the government violates the people’s rights, insurrection is … the most indispensable of duties. —MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE

brief moral history of European colonization: “Fanaticism, the insatiable desire to get rich, and misery—those are, unfortunately, the three sources from which flow that nearly uninterrupted stream of immigrants who, sword in hand, go to cut down, under an alien sky, forests more ancient than the world, watering a still virgin land with the blood of its savage inhabitants, and fertilizing with thousands of scattered cadavers the fields they conquered through crime.”3 This, Mauroy informed Lafayette, was the reality of the “new world” toward which they sailed.

Soldiers mistreated by civilian authorities often cease guarding the flame of liberty, and instead use its last embers to heat the branding iron of military dictatorship.

On the road to Paris, he noticed something unusual: the men he passed did not tip their hats in deference to his position. For most of us, the process of growing up entails discovering the limits of our own, individual significance. But few people can pinpoint with precision the exact moment of that humbling realization. For Lafayette, it was seared into his memory.

Lafayette interjected with his opinion that “memory is a fool’s intellect.

Lafayette was proud to call himself a moderate in an era of extremes. Explaining his philosophy later in life, he insisted that “true moderation consists, not as many people seem to think, in always seeking the middle between any two points … but in trying to recognize the point of truth and holding to it.

Typifying the indelible impressions Lafayette left, the adult Walt Whitman would recall the hero’s 1825 passage through the Brooklyn of his youth.

The sword nobility believed they deserved their rank and status because their ancestors once stood courageously by the king at Agincourt and Castillon, not because their father recently made a fortune selling barrels of salted fish.

John Quincy Adams delivered the official memorial in the House of Representatives. “Pronounce him one of the first men of his age,” Adams said, “and you have not yet done him justice… turn back your eyes upon the records of time; summon from the creation of the world to this day the mighty dead of every age and every clime—and where, among the race of merely mortal men, shall one be found, who, as the benefactor of his kind, shall claim to take precedence of Lafayette?”48 Adams went on. Lafayette discovered no new principles of politics or of morals. He invented nothing in science. He disclosed no new phenomenon in the laws of nature. [But] born and educated in the highest order of feudal nobility, under the most absolute monarchy of Europe, in possession of an affluent fortune, and master of himself and of all his capabilities, at the moment of attaining manhood, the principle of republican justice and of social equality took possession of his heart and mind, as if inspired from above. He devoted himself, his life, his fortune, his hereditary honors, his towering ambition, his splendid hopes, all to the cause of liberty.

The Lafayettes claimed an ancient noble lineage stretching back to the year 1000, which included a maréchal de France who fought alongside Joan of Arc;

Beloved by two families--one in France, the other in America--Lafayette found that whenever he crossed the Atlantic, he was always coming home.

I did not hesitate to be disagreeable to preserve my independence.

In a virtuous government, and more especially in times like these, public offices are, what they should be, burdens to those appointed to them which it would be wrong to decline, though foreseen to bring with them intense labor and great private loss.

The scheme my dear Marqs which you propose as a precedent, to encourage the emancipation of the black people of this country from the Bondage in wch they are held, is a striking evidence of the benevolence of your Heart.

Jefferson would live another two years, Lafayette another ten. But in fact, long before their reunion, the legends of both men had already been sculpted into marble.

Divining cynical motives in others often makes us feel we are revealing hard truth. But, as often as not, the bleak reductivism distorts as much as it clarifies.

For the returning hero, however, such bonhomie could not mask a vexing truth: With the war over, a divisive regionalism now beset his adopted country.