Quotes About France

He [Clemenceau] had one illusion—France; and one disillusion—mankind, including Frenchmen.

I turned my copy over to reread the back cover: always a creepy experience once you had finished a book, like getting a message from a dead person. "Nadja, originally published in France in 1928, is the first and perhaps best Surrealist romance ever written," it said.

The French people are very democratical in their tendencies, but they must have a visible type of hero-worship, and they find it in the bearer of that name Napoleon. That name is the only tradition dear to them, and it is deeply dear. That a man bearing it, and appealing at the same time to the whole people upon democratical principles, should be answered from the heart of the people, should neither astonish, nor shame, nor enrage anybody.

The English newspapers have made me so angry, that I scarcely know whether I am as much ashamed, yet the shame is very great. As if the people of France had not a right to vote as they pleased! We understand nothing in England.

Poor France, poor France! News of the dreadful massacre at Paris just reaches us, and the letters and newspapers not arriving to-day, everybody fears a continuation of the crisis. How is it to end? Who 'despairs of the republic?' Why, I do! I fear, I fear, that it cannot stand in France, and you seem to have not much more hope.

Bishops of Rouen, Fécamp and Jumièges. A

Now, if you are like me - if you are like practically anybody in America - then you probably hold some negative opinions about the French, based upon movies, rumors, recent headlines, unfortunate run-ins with Parisian waiters, or... you know... all that unpleasantness surrounding the Vichy regime.

Extinction finally emerged as a concept, probably not coincidentally, in revolutionary France. It did so largely thanks to one animal, the creature now called the American mastodon, or Mammut americanum, and one man, the naturalist Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier, known after a dead brother simply as Georges.

Then he took me to look at the Maastricht animal, still today one of the world's most famous fossils. (Though the Netherlands has repeatedly asked for it back, the French have held on to it for more than two hundred years.)

Hundreds of thousands of men from both sides were drawn into a battle of attrition on a scale so immense that neither Germany nor France (nor even its ally Great Britain) could ever look on the war, or even the nature of war itself, the same way again.

Mandates were largely a fiction, of course. The distinction between "mandate" and "colony," especially in highly colonized Africa, was meaningless. But the idea provided a fig leaf for Wilson's insistence that the Paris conference not become the tool of European imperialism. France and Britain accepted Wilson's phony compromise.

Briand realized that even now he could not dismiss France's supposed savior outright. So, instead, he elevated him into insignificance, by making Joffre a marshal of France

puentes, ríos y bosques; Francia era un paisaje afortunado—

Baudry, editor de Le Siècle. Publica Los tres mosqueteros entre el 14 de marzo y el 11 de julio de 1844.

A los combatientes españoles muertos por Francia. Y vaya si combatieron. Unos, capturados por los nazis y rechazados por la España franquista, acabaron en campos de exterminio.

Catherine de Medici brought her cooks to France when she married, and those cooks brought sherbet and custard and cream puffs, artichokes and onion soup, and the idea of roasting birds with oranges. As well as cooks, she brought embroidery and handkerchiefs, perfumes and lingerie, silverware and glassware and the idea that gathering around a table was something to be done thoughtfully. In essence, she brought being French to France.

France expects, I fear, too little from her Parliaments ever to get what she ought.

If France had more men of firm will, quiet composure, with a suspicion of enormous principle and a taste for moderate improvement: if a Whig party, in a word, were possible in France, France would be free.

The country that consistently ranks among the highest in educational achievement is Finland. A rich country, but education is free. Germany, education is free. France, education is free.

Published in 1947, 'The Plague' has often been read as an allegory, a book that is really about the occupation of France, say, or the human condition. But it's also a very good book about plagues, and about how people react to them - a whole category of human behavior that we have forgotten.

There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why.

Although all new ideas are born in France, they are not readily adopted there. It seems that they must first commence to prosper in a foreign country.

You know, I left the country when Reagan got in; I went to France.

In France, when there was a war, we fought and our ancestors fought, though many had real reason to flee the Germans.