Quotes About France

Odysseus had twenty years to shed his battle skin. My grandfather left the battle field in France and rode home in a ship that crawled across the ocean slowly so he could catch his breath. I get on a plane in hell and get off, hours later, at home. I try to ignore death, but she's got her arm around my waist waiting to poison everything I touch.

GUILLOTINE, n. A machine which makes a Frenchman shrug his shoulders with good reason.

There is only one science, love, one riches, love, only one policy, love. To make love is all the law and the prophets.

Germany and France are pinning their hopes on young people, in terms of education, science and innovation.

Without the English, reason and philosophy would still be in the most despicable infancy in France.

One economic problem is especially acute here: Unemployment … Most of the other problems, the ones that create a sense of crisis, are anticipatory. They grow out of the fear that the right-wing government's tentative attempts at reform will eventually corral France into an 'Anglo-Saxon' economy, where an unleashed free market will make everybody do awful jobs for no money, forever.

While Jefferson and the Republicans made light of the excesses of the Revolution in France, the Federalists were horrified to see America's sister-republic and erstwhile ally descend into lawlessness.

Young men rushed to enlist, not just to have a go at the British, but also to assert the intellectual supremacy of Enlightenment France.

Une colère noire arrive a un moment où en France quelques voix veulent nous persuader que le raciste devient un résistant, un courageux face à la pensée unique.

People are bound to think that you have corrupted me with your worldly ways, and that you have stolen my heart from my wife." "Well, haven't I?" she said, capturing his bishop. He waited for her to look up at him. After a moment she did. "Madame, that which is not possessed by one, can never be stolen my another. My soul belonged to you long before she ever set foot in France.?

Well, their piety is more evolved," said Mrs. Pace. "In America we have only two forms, as Matthew Arnold said: the bitter and the smug. In France, it appears, there is a third type, the worldly.

I made a French film called 'Merry Christmas' which is a very European film. It's a World War I piece.

My impressions of contemporary France were mixed. I personally felt that it was quite provincial.

For a significant section of the ruling elite the Napoleonic Wars were in one sense a distraction and a sideshow. They saw Russia's main interests as lying in expansion southwards against the Ottomans and Persians. These men seldom saw France itself as Russia's main or inevitable enemy. Most of them believed that the Napoleonic empire was

To be a Frenchman means to fight for your country and its wine," he said.

When people complained, Vichy, unconvincingly, sought to justify its moves by pointing out that one of the reasons France lost the war was that it had too many bars, one bar for every 80 persons compared with one for every 270 people in Germany.

The French had another name for them: the weinführers. Their job as Beauftragter für den Weinimport Frankreich (agents for importing wines from France) was to buy as much good French wine as possible and send it back to Germany, where it would be resold internationally for a huge profit to help pay for the Third Reich's war.

Fearing that the king would try to quash their decisions, the deputies held an emergency session in the only building they could find that was large enough to accommodate them, the king's indoor tennis court. There, they swore the dramatic "Oath of the Tennis Court," pledging not to cease meeting until they had given France a new constitution.

The emergence of this stable, public market for state debt was the most politically significant economic innovation of the age. It allowed the British government to borrow funds at a far lower rate than had been the case when it depended on moneylenders and tax farmers—the system that remained in force in France.

We are like those abandoned fields full of shell holes in France, no less peaceful than other ploughed lands about them, but in them are lying still the buried explosives, and until these shall have been dug out and cleared away, to plough will be a danger both to the plougher and the ploughed.

French endurance was the cornerstone of British defensive strategy. That France might fall was beyond imagining.

Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you you have only to spend a little money.

This decision not to commit the remainder of British air forces to France, despite overweening pressure from his ally and his own Francophilia, was one of the most critical judgements he ever made.

Napoleone di Buonaparte, as he signed himself until manhood, was born in Ajaccio, one of the larger towns on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, just before noon on Tuesday, August 15, 1769.