Daily quote by Joseph Fourier

• I regarded these events as the customary disturbances of a state in which a new usurper tends to pluck the sceptre from his predecessor. ...As the natural ideas of equality were developed it was possible to conceive the sublime hope of establishing among us a free government exempt from kings and priests and to free from this double yoke the long usurped soil of Europe. I readily became enamored of this cause... the greatest and most beautiful which any nation has ever undertaken. ...You will judge whether it is I or my adversaries who are terrorists and persecutors. ...I accuse them of having violated ...all the rules of natural justice, of being ignorant and evil, of profaning the words of humanity and justice in invoking them, just as tyranny was organized in the name of liberty. Finally, of having given themselves up to a boundless revolutionary fury which ought to cover then with disgrace and scorn.
  • Letter to Edmé Pierre Alexanre Villetard (June/July, 1795) from prison, as quoted by John Herivel, Joseph Fourier—The Man and the Physicist (1975) pp. 280-285 (also see p. 27).