Explore "The Judgment of Robespierre" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"It is of little profit," said Robespierre severely, "that we should debate what may or may not come to pass in that time. You speak of more than a hundred years, and of a season when the youngest child before us shall have long been dead, and his child, too, perhaps be dead after him; and for that matter, even if it profited us, it would not be to the service of God, for we must say what is true and defend it. As for the rest, no man is master of destiny."
He was about to make an allusion to the people of Epirus and to a discovery of theirs which he had read in the classics upon this subject, when St. Just interrupted, as was his way, with burning eyes and a sort of high, rhetorical facility which gave all his young words such amazing power. He was sitting in an attitude one might have thought listless, so lightly did his delicate hand lean upon his knee, save that all thought of carelessness left one when one watched the intensity of his face. And he repeated a phrase which its rhythm has made famous, "The things we have said will never be lost on earth."