Dreyfus Quotes

“...it has always been my temperament to prefer a tiny amount of the excellent to a plenitude of the mediocre...”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“We forgive the crimes of individuals, but not their participation in a collective crime.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“Outwardly, I hope, I wear my usual mask of detachment, even irony, for there has never been a situation,however dire, even this one, that did not strike me as containing at least some element of the human comedy.”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“Saddened by the misfortune of the Jews, remembering his friendship with Christians, increasingly mannered and affected as time went on for reasons to be revealed in due course, he now looked like a pre-Raphaelite worm on to which hairs had been indecently grafted, like threads in the depths of an opal.”
― Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way

“I lay aside the papers. Really, it is beyond hypocrisy; it is beyond even lying: it has become a psychosis.”
― Robert Harris, An Officer and a Spy

“It was not, however, to these Fascist groups, numerically unimportant as they were, that the Third Republic owed its collapse. On the contrary, the plain, if paradoxical, truth is that their influence was never so slight as at the moment when the collapse actually took place. What made France fall was the fact that she had no more true Dreyfusards, no one who believed that democracy and freedom, equality and justice could any longer be defended or realized under the republic.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“— Em tese – disse o senhor Lerond –, um erro judiciário é uma coisa inverossímil. Direi mesmo que é uma coisa impossível, uma vez que a lei oferece garantias aos acusados. Digo-o em favor da justiça civil. Digo-o também a favor da justiça militar. Diante do Conselho de Guerra, o acusado, se não encontra todas as garantias nas formas um pouco sumárias do processo, poderá achá-las no caráter dos juízes.”
― Anatole France, The Amethyst Ring

“Eu já não encontro tanto prazer, confesso, em ver essa gente elegante, depois que uma máquina pôs em movimento o fanatismo estúpido e a obtusa crueldade desses pequenos cérebros.”
― Anatole France, Monsieur Bergeret à Paris

“The anti-Dreyfus camp enlisted in defense of the authority of the state and the honor of the army both conservatives and some Leftists influenced by traditional anticapitalist anti-Semitism and Jacobin forms of nationalism. The pro-Dreyfus camp, mostly from Left and center, defended a universal standard of the rights of man. The nation took precedence over any universal value, proclaimed the anti-Dreyfusard Charles Maurras, whose Action Française movement is sometimes considered the first authentic fascism. When a document used to incriminate Dreyfus turned out to have been faked, Maurras was undaunted. It was, he said, a “patriotic forgery,” a faux patriotique.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism