The revolution is not a shame. It was, especially after four years of hunger and blood, a victory. The shame is in the betrayal which was perpetrated on it. All nations which have had a great revolution look back with pride; and every successful revolution made the people who did it great for a time: The Netherlands and England in the seventeenth century as the United States and France in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and also China and Russia in the twentieth century. It is not the successful, it's the smothered and repressed, the betrayed and denied revolutions which make a nation ill. Germany is still ill today as a result of the betrayed revolution of 1918.

Sebastian Haffner