dangerously certain....................

      In the National Assembly, in its two and a half years, Robespierre made some five hundred speeches, usually too long to be convincing, and too argumentative to be eloquent; but the masses of Paris, learning of their tenor, loved him for them.  He opposed racial or religious discrimination, proposed emancipation of the blacks, and became, till his final months, the tribune and defender of the people.  He accepting the institution of private property, but wished to universalize small-scale ownership as an economic basis for a sturdy democracy.  He called inequality of wealth "a necessary and incurable evil," rooted in the natural inequality of human ability.  In this period he supported the retention of the monarchy, properly limited; an attempt to overthrow Louis XVI, he thought, would lead to such chaos and bloodshed as would end in a dictatorship more tyrannical than a King.

     Not till near his end did he seem to doubt the full identity of his judgment with the popular will.  His mind was weaker than his will; most of his ideas were borrowed from his reading, or from the catchwords that filled the revolutionary air; he died too young to have acquired sufficient experience of life, or knowledge of history, to check his abstract or copular conceptions with patient perception or impartial prospective.  He suffered severely from our common failing—he could not get his ego out of the way of his eyes.  The passion of his utterance convinced himself; he became dangerously certain and ludicrously vain.  "That man," said Mirabeau, "will go far, he believes all that he says."  He went to the guillotine.

-Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon