Quotes from Charles de Gaulle

I grew up to always respect authority and respect those in charge.

You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless.

Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back upon himself.

A true leader always keeps an element of surprise up his sleeve which others cannot grasp but which keeps his public excited and breathless.

There can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt.

One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day was; one cannot judge life until death.

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses; they last while they last.

No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.

The leader must aim high, see big, judge widely, thus setting himself apart form the ordinary people who debate in narrow confines.

The true statesman is the one who is willing to take risks.

All my life I have had a certain idea of France.

When I am right, I get angry. Churchill gets angry when he is wrong. We are angry at each other much of the time.

The Jews remain what they have been at all times: an elite people, self-confident and domineering.

To govern is always to choose among disadvantages.

The great leaders have always stage-managed their effects.

France cannot be France without greatness.

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.

Once upon a time there was an old country, wrapped up in habit and caution. We have to transform our old France into a new country and marry it to its time.

I respect only those who resist me, but I cannot tolerate them.

Only peril can bring the French together. One can't impose unity out of the blue on a country that has 265 different kinds of cheese.

Never relinquish the initiative.

I wouldn't mind dying for France, but not for Air France.

In the tumult of great events, solitude was what I hoped for. Now it is what I love. How is it possible to be contented with anything else when one has come face to face with history?