Treason Quotes

In the 20th Century, treason became a vocation whose modern form was specifically the treason of ideas.

Whittaker Chambers

We have sworn, and not lightly. This oath we will keep. We are threatened with many evils, and treason not least; but one thing is not said: that we shall suffer from cowardice, from cravens or the fear of cravens. Therefore I say that we will go on, and this doom I add: the deeds that we shall do shall be the matter of song until the last days of Arda.

J.R.R. Tolkien

Any appeasement of tyranny is treason to this republic and to the democratic ideal.

William Allen White

The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

T. S. Eliot

A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law.

Kurt Huber

I know that many have been taught to think that moderation, in a case like this, is a sort of treason.

Edmund Burke

More men are guilty of treason through weakness than any studied design to betray.

François de la Rochefoucauld

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Treason, which begins by being cautious, ends by betraying itself.

Alphonse de Lamartine

Rebellion must be managed with many swords; treason to his prince's person may be with one knife.

Thomas Fuller

Fellowship in treason is a bad ground of confidence.

Edmund Burke

Ah, when to the heart of man was it ever less than a treason to go with the drift of things to yield with a grace to reason and bow and accept at the end of a love or a season.

Brendan Francis

The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.

Thomas Carlyle

The unsuccessful strugglers against tyranny have been the chief martyrs of treason laws in all countries.

Thomas Jefferson

The world, as transformed by this creative deed, is better than it would have been had all else remained the same, but had that deed of treason not been done at all.

Josiah Royce