Paris

"Paris flared — Paris, which the divine sun had sown with light, and where in glory waved the great future harvest of Truth and of Justice."

"As our tour of the history of forgotten violence comes within sight of the present, the landmarks start to look more familiar. But even the zone of cultural memory from the last century has relics that feel like they belong to a foreign country. Take the decline of martial culture. The older cities in Europe and the United States are dotted with public works that flaunt the nation’s military might. Pedestrians can behold statues of commanders on horseback, beefcake sculptures of well-hung Greek warriors, victory arches crowned by chariots, and iron fencing wrought into the shape of swords and spears. Subway stops are named for triumphant battles: the Paris Métro has an Austerlitz station; the London Underground has a Waterloo station. Photos from a century ago show men in gaudy military dress uniforms parading on national holidays and hobnobbing with aristocrats at fancy dinners. The visual branding of long-established states is heavy on aggressive iconography, such as projectiles, edged weapons, birds of prey, and predatory cats. Even famously pacifistic Massachusetts has a seal that features an amputated arm brandishing a sword and a Native American holding a bow and arrow above the state motto, “With the sword we seek peace, but under liberty.” Not to be outdone, neighboring New Hampshire adorns its license plates with the motto “Live Free or Die.”"

"Few areas of the national life of those Western European countries failed to benefit from the decades of parasitic exploitation of the colonies. One Nigerian, after visiting Brussels in 1960, wrote: “I saw for myself the massive palaces, museums and other public buildings paid for by Congo ivory and rubber.” In recent times, African writers and researchers have also been amazed to find the amount of looted African treasure stacked away in the ; and there are comparable if somewhat smaller collections of African art in Paris, Berlin, and New York. Those are some of the things which, in addition to monetary wealth, help to define the metropoles as developed and “civilized.”"

"Napoleon had forged his academic revolution with the creation of institutions such as the Ecole Polytechnique and the Ecole Normale Superieure. But too strong an emphasis on mathematics serving the needs of the state had seen Paris lose its place as the focus of mathematical activity to the medieval town of Gottingen, where the more abstract approach of Gauss and Riemann was allowed to flourish. In the second half of the twentieth century there was a new optimism in France that Paris could regain its position as a key player in the world of mathematics."

"Seattle sucks. New York and Chicago are real cities. Seattle is Dubuque, Iowa, putting on airs. People here think Seattle is Paris... it ain't. I've been to Paris, and this place isn't Paris."

"Outside the curtained windows, Paris stewed in its miasma of self-congratulation and diesel fumes."

"It was the human spirit itself that failed at Paris. It is no use passing judgments and making scapegoats of this or that individual statesman or group of statesmen. Idealists make a great mistake in not facing the real facts sincerely and resolutely. They believe in the power of the spirit, in the goodness which is at the heart of things, in the triumph which is in store for the great moral ideals of the race. But this faith only too often leads to an optimism which is sadly and fatally at variance with actual results. It is the realist and not the idealist who is generally justified by events. We forget that the human spirit, the spirit of goodness and truth in the world, is still only an infant crying in the night, and that the struggle with darkness is as yet mostly an unequal struggle…. Paris proved this terrible truth once more. It was not Wilson who failed there, but humanity itself. It was not the statesmen that failed, so much as the spirit of the peoples behind them."

"America is my country and Paris is my home town and it is as it has come to be."

"And so I am an American and I have lived half my life in Paris, not the half that made me but the half in which I made what I made."

"Good talkers are only found in Paris."

"Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art."

"Il en coûte bien cher pour mourir à Paris."

"In Paris a queer little man you may see, A little man all in gray; Rosy and round as an apple is he, Content with the present whate'er it may be, While from care and from cash he is equally free, And merry both night and day! "Ma foi! I laugh at the world." says he, "I laugh at the world, and the world laughs at me!" What a gay little man in gray."

"Lindbergh's arrival in Paris became the defining moment of his life, that event on which all his future actions hinged — as though they were but a predestined series of equal but opposite reactions, fraught with irony... In the spring of 1927, Lindbergh had been too consumed by what he called "the single objective of landing my plane at Paris" to have considered its aftermath. "To plan beyond that had seemed an act of arrogance I could not afford," he would later write. Even if he had thought farther ahead, however, he could never have predicted the unprecedented global response to his arrival. By that year, radio, telephones, radiographs, and the Bartlane Cable Process could transmit images and voices around the world within seconds. What was more, motion pictures had just mastered the synchronization of sound, allowing dramatic moments to be preserved in all their glory and distributed worldwide. For the first time all of civilization could share as one the sights and sounds of an event — almost instantaneously and simultaneously. And in this unusually good-looking, young aviator — of apparently impeccable character — the new technology found its first superstar. The reception in Paris was only a harbinger of the unprecedented worship people would pay Lindbergh for years. Without either belittling or aggrandizing the importance of his flight, he considered it part of the continuum of human endeavor, and that he was, after all, only a man. The public saw more than that... Universally admired, Charles Lindbergh became the most celebrated living person ever to walk the Earth."

"Paris dictates fashion to the whole world."

"We'll always have Paris."

"The urban renewal programme is one of the most spectacular urban programmes to have been undertaken in Paris; it is certainly the one which has provoked the biggest public outcry. The renewal programme in the strict sense of the term, has two essential characteristics:"

":1) It concerns an already structured social space, of which it changes the form, the social content and/or function."

":2) It is based on public initiative, whatever the legal or financial form of the renewal agency, where private enterprise may take over the work, as in the case of Opératioll Italie."

"I am working in Paris. I cannot for a single day get the thought out of my head that there probably exists something essential, some immutable reality, and now that I have lost everything else (thank God, it gets lost all on its own) I am trying to preserve this and, what is more, not to be content. In a word: I am working."

"Only the great distance that separates Paris from my native town prevented me from going back.. ..It was the Louvre that put end to all these hesitations. When I walked around the circular Veronese room and the rooms that the works of Manet, Delacroix and Courbet are in, I desired nothing more. In my imagination Russia (where Chagall was born, fh) took the form of a basket suspended from a parachute. The deflated pear of the balloon was hanging down, growing cold and descending slowly in the course of the years. This was how Russian art appeared to me, or something of the sort.. ..It was as if Russian art had been fatally condemned to remain in the wake of the West. (on his arrival in Paris in 1910, fh)"

"Paris is a city of amusements and pleasures, where four fifths of the inhabitants die of the spleen."

"Boston is among an increasing number of municipalities, universities, and private foundations that have announced plans to divest from fossil fuels. In late October, ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP26, Auckland, New Zealand; Copenhagen, Denmark; Glasgow, Scotland; Paris; Rio de Janeiro; and Seattle announced commitments to divest from fossil fuel companies and increase investments to make cities more sustainable. Also last month, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott signed a bill that requires the city’s three pension funds to divest from the fossil fuel industry. Those are in addition to divestment commitments made last year by Berlin; Bristol, England; Cape Town, South Africa; Durban, South Africa; London; Los Angeles; Milan; New Orleans; New York City; Oslo; Norway; Pittsburgh; and Vancouver, Canada. “Cities are at the forefront of tackling the climate emergency and there is real momentum to move investments away from fossil fuels and toward climate solutions,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is chair-elect of C40 Cities, a network of mayors working to confront climate change, said in a statement. “I will continue to encourage more cities to join the movement, and urge national governments and private finance institutions to mobilize more finance to invest directly in cities to support a green and fair recovery.”"

"Aline and I have travelled a very long, very hard road together, from our working class homes in rural Quebec to the palaces of London, Paris, Moscow, and Beijing. Politics was the route, public service the reward."

"Paris is like a pretty woman; when she gives you a smack, you don't smack back."

"I had a great Desire to see Paris, & its Curiosities: that being generally esteemed the Centre of Taste, Magnificence, Beauty & every Thing that is polite."

"Tuit estrangier l'aiment et ameront, Car pour deduit et pour estre jolis, Jamais cité tele ne trouveront: Riens ne se puet comparer a Paris."

"Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it."

"Oh, London is a man’s town, there’s power in the air; And Paris is a woman’s town, with flowers in her hair; And it’s sweet to dream in Venice, and it’s great to study Rome; But when it comes to living, there is no place like home."

"The creation of Modern France through expansion goes back to the establishment of a small kingdom in the area around Paris in the late tenth century and was not completed until the incorporation of Nice and Savoy in 1860. The existing "hexagon" was the result of a long series of wars and conquests involving the triumph of French language and culture over what once were autonomous and culturally distinctive communities. The assimilation of Gascons, Savoyards, Occitans, Basques, and others helped to sustain the myth that French overseas expansionism in the nineteenth century, especially to North and West Africa, was a continuation of the same assmilationist project."

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."

"I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.""

"But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight."

"Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris."

"Paris somehow lends itself to conceptual new ideas. I don't know why it is. There is a certain magic to that city."

"Cities like London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, or Glasgow are high spots of slavery in comparison to Albania, Bulgaria, or even Central Africa. The slavery of the watch and clock, the bourgeois, anthropocentric slavery of material prestige and successful competition (to slave in order to keep up standards), the wage slavery of the proletarian, the school slavery of the children, the conscription slavery of the adolescents, the road slavery, the factory slavery, the barrack slavery, the party slavery, the office slavery, the parlor slavery of manners and conventions — all these slaveries make political "freedom" appear a bitter joke."

"Fair Paris caught the crimson hue — Well may I call it fair. With its pure heaven of softest blue. Its clear and sunny air — Soft fell the morning o’er each dome That rises mid the sky ; And, conscious of the day to come, Demand their place on high. Round the Pantheon’s height was wrought A web of royal red ; A glory as if morning brought Its homage to the dead. And Notre Dame’s old gothic towers Were bathed in roseate bloom, As Time himself had scattered flowers Over that mighty tomb."

"The words of the great French anthem rang out over the town square, sung for the first time by liberated Frenchmen in the free capital of Normandy and sung with such a feeling of life and warmth as has not been heard in France for four years.... Paris is the happiest city in the world tonight. All Paris is dancing in the streets."

"In Paris one is too preoccupied by what one sees and what one hears, however strong one is; what I am doing here has, I think, the merit of not resembling anyone, because it is simply the expression of what I myself have experienced."

"Send me 300 francs; that sum will enable me to go to Paris. There, at least, one can cut a figure and surmount obstacles. Everything tells me I shall succeed. Will you prevent me from doing so for the want of 100 crowns?"

"The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people — people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from normal standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words."

"The jobless and hopeless kids in the suburbs may burn a couple of cars, but we’ll always have Paris."

"Sowie Gott in Paris eine schöne Frau entstehen lässt, schickt der Teufel als Antwort einen Narren, der sie aushält."

"Provinz bleibt Provinz, sie macht sich lächerlich, wenn sie Paris nachäffen möchte."

"Man muss in Paris und ausschließlich mit Leuten zusammenleben, die ein fröhliches Leben führen! Sie sind glücklich und daher weniger bösartig. Die Menschenseele ist wie ein verpesteter Sumpf; wenn man nicht rasch darüber hinweggleitet, versinkt man darin."

"In unserer Welt der Übermobilisierung, Billigflieger und Freiheit des Individuums steht es jedem frei, nach Paris oder Zürich zu fliegen, um dort die vermeintliche Krönung kulinarischer Kunst zu genießen. Wen aber der Wind des Schicksals nach Manchester verschlägt, der sollte auch bereit sein, dort Fish and Chips zu essen."

"In Paris, möchte man sagen, schweben vier Städte über einander; in London macht Jeder Anspruch auf sein Plätzchen auf Gottes Erdboden, und nur Fremde, einzelne Familien, oder in ihren Mitteln sehr beschränkte Personen, bewohnen Etagen, die dann auch freilich bei der Kleinheit der Häuser wenig Bequemlichkeit darbieten."

"In Paris hat man eine gewisse Art, einen Menschen zu erledigen, indem man ihm sagt: Er hat ein gutes Herz. Dieser Satz bedeutet ebensoviel wie: Der arme Junge ist dumm wie ein Rhinozeros."

"Einer der Vorzüge der guten Stadt Paris besteht darin, dass man hier geboren werden, leben und sterben kann, ohne dass sich jemand auch nur im mindesten darum kümmert."

"Der Pariser wundert sich, wenn nicht überall alles so ist wie in Paris, und der Franzose, wie in Frankreich."