Quotes About French

Eighteenth-century doctors prescribed sugar pills for nearly everything: heart problems, headache, consumption, labor pains, insanity, old age, and blindness. Hence, the French expression 'like an apothecary without sugar' meant someone in an utterly hopeless situation.

We think of the revolution ending in Yorktown, Va. The fact of the matter is that the French defeated the British in a naval battle right in the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Because the British fleet was coming to rescue Cornwallis, the British general, Washington was able to surround Cornwallis.

The poor performance of the huge Soviet army against the tiny Finnish army had been a big embarrassment to the Soviet Union: about eight Soviet soldiers killed for every Finn killed. The longer a war with Finland went on, the higher was the risk of British and French intervention, which would drag the Soviet Union into war with those countries and invite a British/French attack on Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus.

Our own dimension was coded ID-11 and was the only League member with diphtheria, David Hasselhoff and the French, which amused the rest of the multiverse no end.

This cousin had a girlfriend with cheekbones to break your heart, and you knew she was the real thing when she steadfastly refused to acknowledge your presence. She possessed secrets—about islands, about horses, about French pronunciation—that you would never know.

deconstruction and other French theories] was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory.

Les français sont des italiens sont des français de mauvaise humeur.

I francesi sono degli italiani di cattivo umore.

Ordinary French people. Citizens of fear.

I get work because I'm primarily a novelist but I've become script doctor. I can work back and forth between French and English.

It has been stressful to be a French resident in America.

I happen to have been born a Cartesian. The French education is based on a sequence of strict logic. You carry it with you.

I think before 1997 is over, NATO will have taken giant strides in what's called adaptation, the discussions about bringing the French fully into the NATO forces.

A revolution in itself is not a blessing. The revolution accomplished by the French people is, indeed, a wonderful event - the most striking, in my opinion, in history; but it may lead to events which will make it a mighty evil.

Stripes are very French - who doesn't love a good stripe?

My family is from New Orleans. My grandma is French. Everybody else is from Mississippi - Creole people.

I can bake. I made myself some nice French fries once. But otherwise I just eat out. Lots of salad bars.

I ought to at least be able to read literature in French. I went to an enlightened grade school that started us on French in fifth grade, which meant that by the time I graduated high school I had been at it for eight years.

The word "buccaneer" originated in a native people's term for smokehouse, which the French pronounced boucan. The original boucaniers didn't board ships and steal treasure; they were the jerky kings of the Western Hemisphere.

But clothing themselves in the trappings of democracy, dictators may, like drag queens, tend to overdo it, and Napoleon wanted there to be no doubt that his French Republic was more democratic than any before it.

Three months earlier, in that first riot, the French Guards had followed orders and fired on the rioters. Yet on July 14, instead of doing their job and defending the Bastille, the French Guards joined the rioters, and would soon declare themselves the National Guard. The war minister informed the king that he could no longer guarantee the loyalty of any French soldier or junior officer. Without its army, the royal government collapsed.

energized and emboldened delegates of the Third Estate, the "99 percent"—in reality, closer to 96 percent—of the French population who paid the bulk of the taxes

Dumas was possibly the strongest man in the French army.… In the riding school he liked to stand up in the stirrups, take hold of an overhead beam, and lift himself and his horse bodily off the ground.

The past was a consumable, subject to the national preference for familiar products. And history, in America, is a dish best served plain. The first course could include a dollop of Italian in 1492, but not Spanish spice or French sauce or too much Indian corn. Nothing too filling or fancy ahead of the turkey and pumpkin pie, just the way Grandma used to cook it.