Quotes About French

eight hundred small boats had loaded 338,000 men into larger ships during the legendary evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk, including 500 French officers and 18,000 French sailors, to prevent them from being captured or killed by the Germans.

if the French army was defeated, it was impossible to imagine that the English would survive.

I have promised the Tunisian people that the French army will go, If I fail, I will be swept away.

George W. Bush, the former US president, is reputed to have complained that the problem with the French is that they do not have a word for entrepreneurship in their language.

Monroe also saved Tom Paine, whose revolutionary fervor had inspired him to become a French citizen and win a seat in the Convention. When Paine voted against executing King Louis XVI, however, Robespierre sent him to prison, where he languished in ever-deteriorating health until Monroe rescued him in November 1794, and brought him to La Folie to recuperate.

The Labor government of 1945, which was put in power by popular vote and did what the people wanted, was nearer the Marxist idea than any of the governments thrown up by revolution, French, Russian or other.

I never saw any good of the French language, for my part, I must confess," said Miss Debby, "nor, for that matter, of the French nation either; they eat frogs, and break the Sabbath, and are as immoral as the old Canaanites.

It's the golden age of French cinema again but it's because Sarkozy had the guts to push through copyright law.

I wouldn't presume to define noir - if we could define it, we wouldn't need to use a French word for it - but it seems to me it's more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.

The French actually coined a word for urban strollers, flâneurs, people who derive

Among the lessons taught by the French Revolution there is none sadder or more striking than this, that you may make everything else out of the passions of men except a political system that will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma.

Anne-Marie Costallat, born October 8, 1944. I was beginning high school and masturbating twice a day, curling over it like a dead leaf, when she was born, in a bed of violets, as she says—all French mothers tell their children that.

General Lawton Collins, a top American adviser, said that the United States must put the squeeze on the French to get them off their fannies. Nothing of that sort happened, and the French, hanging on to major cities such as Hanoi and Saigon, foolishly decided in early 1954 to fight a decisive battle at Dienbienphu, a hard-to-defend redoubt deep in rebel-held territory near the border with Laos.49

No, Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very 'aimable,' have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people: nothing really amiable about him.

Bonsoir, chérie

I had always studied French and was obsessed with French films. I hated the way American films always had happy endings. I liked the way French films had dark and unpleasant characters; it was much more realistic.

I write in the most classical French because this form is necessary for my novels: to translate the murky, floating, unsettling atmosphere I wanted them to have, I had to discipline it into the clearest, most traditional language possible.

Even for natives, French satire is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Its unspoken punch line is typically that things have gone irrevocably wrong, and the government is to blame.

You don't like it when a French housewife gets mad at you. If she gets steam behind her, she is an unstoppable creature.

The Russians are very much more up and down than the French.

I feel French is very close to Urdu. Both languages are beautiful. Sadly, their beauty is lost in translation.

In the Middle Ages, everything bad was the work of the devil, everything good, the work of God. Today, the French see everything in reverse and blame the Germans for it.

I don't feel guilty about expressing myself in French; nor do I feel that I am continuing the work of the colonizers.

I can't impress people with the pedigree of obscure French filmmakers that got me into film. It was Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg. I really thought I wanted to make dumb action movies.