Holy Madness Quotes

“A drama will be enacted in Germany compared with which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless idyll,’ wrote Heine in a moment of foreboding. ‘Christianity may have restrained the martial ardour of the Teutons for a time, but it did not destroy it; now that the restraining talisman, the cross, has rotted away, the old frenzied madness will break out again.’[459]”
― Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871

“The Grand Conspiracy, a Devil-substitute for an age that was too grown-up to believe in the horned version, had been born. ‘There is something satanic about the French Revolution that distinguishes it from everything we have known, and perhaps from everything we will ever witness,”
― Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871

“Just as starry-eyed Western intellectuals in the twentieth century would transfer to the Soviet Union all their own fantasies of the ideal state, so the idealists of late eighteenth-century Europe doted on the American Eden.”
― Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871

“Man seeks ecstasy and transcendence, and if he cannot find them in church, he will look for them elsewhere.”
― Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871

“The Westminster government continued to aggravate the situation by haughty mismanagement, and on 4 July 1776 the Congress passed a Declaration of Independence from Britain. This was a constitutionally dubious act with no real democratic basis. Only one in five of the inhabitants of the colonies was in any sense active in the cause of independence, and there were at least 500,000 declared loyalists (out of a total population of 2,500,000) at the beginning of the war.”
― Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871

“In his Hymn to the Love of the Motherland, written after the first partition of Poland, Bishop Ignacy Krasicki, a Voltairian and no friend of the confederates, extolled the ‘delights’ of suffering and dying in the cause. Paoli”
― Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871

“They seem a selfish, churlish, unsocial race, totally absorbed in making money; a mongrel breed, half-English, half-Dutch, with the worst qualities of both countries,”
― Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871

“You must flee from them as you flee from roses that cannot be touched without exposure to the thorns. You must fear an agreeable contagion, the more dangerous because it is hidden. The serpent glides among the flowers.”
― Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871

“Young men rushed to enlist, not just to have a go at the British, but also to assert the intellectual supremacy of Enlightenment France.”
― Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871