Quotes About French

There is the world of ideas and there is the world of practice; the French are often for suppressing the one and the English the other; but neither is to be suppressed.

Following a 1945 Muslim revolt in Algeria in which a hundred Europeans were killed, an estimated twenty-five thousand people were slaughtered by French troops. After a March 1947 rebellion in Madagascar, where thirty-seven thousand colons lorded it over 4.2 million black subjects, the army killed ninety thousand people.

In the course of the war, some 70,000 French people were killed by Allied bombs: "collateral damage" in France thus included almost one-third more civilians accidentally killed than the British suffered from the Luftwaffe's deliberate assault on their island. Bombing played a critical role in slowing the German buildup after D-Day, but the price was high.

Between 20 and 23 August, 40,000 French soldiers died. By 29 August, total French casualties since the war began reached 260,000, including 75,000 dead.

On December 24, a young French royalist burst into Darlan's office at the Summer Palace and shot him dead. Responsibility for the assassination remains one of the last significant mysteries of the Second World War. The immediate perpetrator, one Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle, was hurried before a firing squad two days later.

A French proverb says 'Wait until it is night before saying that it has been a fine day.' To tell it more precise, wait till the clock strikes the midnight!

Nuit-Saint-Georges, a French pinot noir from a sub-region of Burgundy's Côte de Nuits. All I can tell you is that it was a profound taste revelation! Ever since that night I have loved

In 1362, for the first time in almost three centuries, English was acknowledged as a language of official business. Since the Conquest, court cases had been heard in French. Now the law recognised that too few people understood that language, perhaps because many of the educated lawyers, like the clergy, had died in the plague. From now on, it was declared, cases could be pleaded, defended, debated and judged in English.

This is the political dimension of the mathematics of compound interest. It is the pro-rentier policy that the French Physiocrats and British liberals sought to reverse by clearing away the legacy of European feudalism.

La petite mort - that's what the French called orgasm. They believed that semen is sort of concentrated blood so that each time a man came he shortened his life a little by spilling blood that couldn't be replenished." "And women?" "Then, as now, men didn't much concern themselves with how women felt.

Does that mean the French are getting in on the act?" "Actually, they were in on the act before we got here. That's why so much French is spoken. Their legal system, for instance, is based on the Napoleonic Code." "You want to watch that. They could take advantage of that. You want to get them out." "In fact, we did get them out. That's why we're here.

Vous vous intéressez aux vins? - Ça me donne une contenance; ça fait français. Et puis il faut s'intéresser à quelque chose, dans la vie, je trouve que ça aide.

For the French, an intellectual didn't have to be responsible. That wasn't his job.

There had already been one attempt to form an Islamic party, the French Muslim Party, but it soon fell apart over the embarrassing anti-Semitism of its leader--so extreme that it drove him into an alliance with the far right. The Muslim Brotherhood learned its lesson and was careful to take a moderate line.

THE NATURE OF FRENCH STARDOM (beginning early, staying late) makes it possible for a woman to grow up on screen. Marceau has been in films now for over thirty years. Catherine Deneuve's career is past the midcentury mark. Danielle Darrieux has the ultimate record to reach for—she started at age fourteen and made films into her nineties. Theirs become lives recorded in all their stages, and it's fascinating to notice the changes.

I'm a fiend when it comes to good pastry, and the French make the best as far as I'm concerned.

Making choices that are meaningful to you is the essence of the French woman's secret.

The real reason French women don't get fat is not genetic, but cultural, and if the French subjected themselves to the American extremes of eating and dieting, the obesity problem in France would be much worse than what has struck America.

If my fellow Americans could adopt even a fraction of the French attitude about food and life (don't worry, you don't have to sign on to the politics, too), managing weight would cease to be a terror, an obsession, and reveal its true nature as part of the art of living.

Saint-Exupéry's Le Petit Prince is a book all French people know well. It can be read in an hour but is packed with timeless wisdom.

As the French know well, ritual is how we give meaning to different aspects of being alive, including the most elemental: birth, marriage, death, and through it all, until the end, eating.

If bad eating habits are your way of compensating for another problem, stay tuned, because French women have a much more varied menu of compensations.

Making choices that are meaningful to you is the essence of the French woman's secret.

I would advocate that chocolate be covered by health insurance, but that is admittedly a very French public policy perspective.