France Quotes

The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.

~ Frédéric Bastiat

Laissez faire laissez passer.

~ François Quesnay

... you’ll have to fall in love at least once in your life, or Paris has failed to rub off on you.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

Hope is a beautiful and magical thing. Grasp it tight, monsieur, and never let go.

~ Rachel L. Demeter

The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law, and its name is vengeance; it is not neutral, nor does it allow us to remain neutral. All social questions achieve their finality around that blade. The scaffold is an image. It is not merely a framework, a machine, a lifeless mechanism of wood, iron, and rope. It is as though it were a being having its own dark purpose, as though the framework saw, the machine listened, and the mechanism understood; as though that arrangement of wood and iron and rope expressed a will. In the hideous picture which its presence evokes it seems to be most terribly a part of what it does. It is the executioner's accomplice; it consumes, devouring flesh and drinking blood. It is a kind of monster created by the judge and the craftsman; a spectre seeming to live an awful life born of the death it deals.

~ Victor Hugo

Laissez faire, laissez passer.

~ François Quesnay

With heart at rest I climbed the citadel'sSteep height, and saw the city as from a tower,Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells,Where evil comes up softly like a flower.Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain,Not for vain tears I went up at that hour;But like an old sad faithful lecher, fainTo drink delight of that enormous trullWhose hellish beauty makes me young again.Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapors full,Sodden with day, or, new appareled, standIn gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,I love thee, infamous city! Harlots andHunted have pleasures of their own to give,The vulgar herd can never understand.

~ Charles Baudelaire

When Hitler marched across the RhineTo take the land of France,La dame de fer decided,‘Let’s make the tyrant dance.’Let him take the land and city,The hills and every flower,One thing he will never have,The elegant Eiffel Tower.The French cut the cables,The elevators stood still,‘If he wants to reach the top,Let him walk it, if he will.’The invaders hung a swastikaThe largest ever seen.But a fresh breeze blewAnd away it flew,Never more to be seen.They hung up a second mark,Smaller than the first,But a patriot climbedWith a thought in mind:‘Never your duty shirk.’Up the iron ladyHe stealthily made his way,Hanging the bright tricolour,He heroically saved the day.Then, for some strange reason,A mystery to this day,Hitler never climbed the tower,On the ground he had to stay.At last he ordered she be razedDown to a twisted pile.A futile attack, for still she standsBeaming her metallic smile.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.

~ Roman Payne

You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth—and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere.

~ Boris Johnson

If your arteries are good, eat more ice cream. If they are bad, drink more red wine. Proceed thusly.

~ Sandra Byrd

The love of all people except the French people, is deep in the mind of the great doctors of the French Republic.

~ Charles Maurras

Lebedev: France has a clear and defined policy... The French know what they want. They just want to wipe out the Krauts, finish, but Germany, my friend, is playing a very different tune. Germany has many more birds in her sights than just France...Shabelsky: Nonsense! ...In my view the German are cowards and the French are cowards... They're just thumbing their noses at each other. Believe me, things will stop there. They won't fight.Borkin: And as I see it, why fight? What's the point of these armaments, congresses, expenditures? You know what I'd do? I'd gather together dogs from all over the country, give them a good dose of rabies and let them loose in enemy country. In a month all my enemies would be running rabid.

~ Anton Chekhov

...all the men in the photograph wear puttees. All the men in the picture are bound, trying to keep themselves together. That is how considerate they are, for the love of God and country and women and the other men--for the love of all that is good and true--they keep themselves together because they have to. They are afraid but they are not cowards.

~ Elena Mauli Shapiro

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where—as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen—even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their mee

~ Christopher Hitchens

I've got one thing to say: I killed a lot of germans, and I'm only sorry I didn't kill more.

~ Nancy Wake

... the old Berlin – last vestige of a mysterious fête – wheeled away from the gravelled road and went lurching noiselessly across country over a grass-grown track. Beyond the hedge nothing could be seen of it but the driver's cap bobbing up and down.

~ Alain-Fournier

Yes, sir, there are things to see and do on the French Riviera without spending money.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Seuls les poissons morts suivent le courant' - Only dead fish follow the current

~ Mike Bodnar

How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?

~ Charles De Gaulle

The French political class has been relentlessly myopic, if not completely blind, about the concerns of those who work and mine and farm. .... To cite Eugene Weber, One thing that we learn from history is that people seldom learn from history.

~ Ronald Rosbottom

Do not be surprised,' she said. 'It is I, and it is not I; You shall find me again, and you shall lose me; Once more shall I come among you; for few men have seen me, and none has understood me; And you shall forget me, and you shall recognize me, and you shall forget me.

~ Marcel Schwob

To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.

~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir

France, stop throwing awards at me! I have so many already, give them to people who need them.

~ Nuno Roque

The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, 'We're sorry we did it,' that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it's just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, 'We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.' Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.

~ Noam Chomsky

It was like the first time I visited Versailles. There was an eerieness, like I'd been there before. I don't know if I was Louis XIV or Marie Antoinette or a lowly groundskeeper, but I lived there.

~ Maurice Minnifield

The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced.

~ Simone De Beauvoir

Historians are lenient to those who succeed and stern to those who fail; in this, and this alone, they display strong political sense.

~ J. Christopher Herold

Only eight months had gone since Henry VIII of England had been suspended in death, there to lie like Mohammed’s coffin, hardly in the Church nor out of it, attended by his martyrs and the acidulous fivefold ghosts of his wives. King Francis of France, stranded by his neighbour’s death in the midst of a policy so advanced, so brilliant and so intricate that it should at last batter England to the ground, and be damned to the best legs in Europe—Francis, bereft of these sweet pleasures, dwindled and died likewise.

~ Dorothy Dunnett

By the second cycle of the solstice of the warm time, the One will face the enemy. And the One will unearth the Shield of the Northern Lights and smote the enemy with daring and intelligence. The heart of the One is pious and evil will cower. Couatl will rise.

~ Barbara T. Cerny

And the One will win the Armor of the Easter Dawn and defeat the enemy with audacity and wisdom. The body of the One is strong and ready to lead. Lammasu will pounce

~ Barbara T. Cerny

And the One will take the Sword of the Western Sun and triumph over the enemy with boldness and insight. The arm of the One is steady and heads will roll. Snow Giants will battle

~ Barbara T. Cerny

And the One will reveal the Bow of the Southern Star and conquer the enemy with courage and fine judgment. The sight of the One is true and the enemy cannot hide. Griffon will fly

~ Barbara T. Cerny

To a common man, the opulence of the day makes no sense but to a philosopher, it is as clear as a night in the southern France.

~ Indiana Lang

Who ought to be the king of france-the person who has the title, or the man who has the power?

~ Pepin The Short

If you feel joy when you do something unselfish for him, and would just as soon do it in secret as openly, then that rings of the true metal

~ Susan Vreeland

For gypsies do not like to stay -They only come to go away.

~ Ludwig Bemelmans

In French culture, the best way of buying time or getting off the hook entirely in a thorny personal situation is to claim that it’s complicated. The French did not invent love, but they did invent romance, so they’ve had more time than any other culture on earth to refine the nuances of its language.

~ Mark Zero

The French have a penchant for absolutism, for thinking that things are all one way or all another, which is why their politics are marked by a general inability to compromise and why they tend to hold their personal opinions until the bitter end, even after they have clearly lost an argument.

~ Mark Zero

... she was a pudding of immaturity and precocious wisdom that had not yet set into a stable mold.

~ Mark Zero