1776: A declaration of the Parliament of Paris:The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position.

— Hilary Mantel

Abroad? Oh, no. I went to England in ’91, and you stood in the garden at Fontana and berated me.” He shook his head. “This is my nation. Here I stay. A man can’t carry his country on the soles of his shoes.

— Hilary Mantel

A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs.

— Hilary Mantel

All that evening he talked to the Candle of Arras, in a low confidential tone. When you get down to it, he thought, there's not much difference between politics and sex; it's all about power. He didn't suppose he was the first person in the world to make this observation. It's a question of seduction, and how fast and cheap you can effect it: if Camille, he thought, approximates to one of those little milliners who can't make ends meet - in other words, an absolute pushover - then Robespierre is a Carmelite, mind set on becoming Mother Superior. You can't corrupt her; you can wave your cock under her nose, and she's neither shocked nor interested: why should she be, when she hasn't the remotest idea what it's for?

— Hilary Mantel

A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the guessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

— Hilary Mantel

And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at Balmy and in a half dozen actions since. In the National Assembly he was a liberal; now he is a republican. Isn’t it then logical that he should be thrown into jail, July 1, on suspicion of passing military secrets to the enemy?

— Hilary Mantel

As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire.

— Hilary Mantel

As More says, it hardly makes a man a hero, to agree to stand and burn once he is chained to a stake. I have written books and cannot write them. I cannot unbeliever what I believe. Furthermore, I cannot unlive my life. Pg.404

— Hilary Mantel

As the year goes on, certain deputies—and others, high in public life—will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. They affect the style of men who begin their mornings with a splash under a backyard pump, and who stop off at their street-corner bar for a nip of spirits on their way to ten hours’ manual labor. Citizen Robespierre, however, is a breathing rebuke to these men; he retains his buckled shoes, his striped coat of olive green. Can it be the same coat that he wore in the first year of the Revolution? He is not profligate with coats. While Citizen Danton tears off the starched linen that fretted his thick neck, Citizen Saint-Just’s cravat grows ever higher, stiffer, more wonderful to behold. He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker.

— Hilary Mantel

But I had to think to myself that this was normal, because that was the attitude. I was 19 when I went to see my doctor, and I was told it was all in the mind.[Author Hilary Mantel on being told her endometriosis was imagined pain, From Oct 2009 Daily Mail interview]

— Hilary Mantel