All Quotes

"When I came to England in the late 60s, Sergeant Pepper was ruling the land, de Gaulle was the Great Satan"

"We have both faced serious problems this year in bearing our respective responsibilities. But standing back from these immediate problems, I trust you share with me the faith that the clouds of war are slowly beginning to lift from Southeast Asia and that by giving our full support to the Jarring Mission we can prevent them from enveloping the Middle East again. In different ways, we each have borne governmental responsibilities for some thirty years. Recalling what our nations have been through in this time and the underlying prosperity and security they now enjoy, I would hope you, too, look with confidence on the future of our nations and the western family of which they are a part."

"In this grave hour for France, I want you to know of my continuing friendship and support as well as that of the American people. Your personal achievements in bringing the resurgence of France as a great champion of freedom have won the esteem of all those who cherish liberty. The course you have chosen to settle the tragic problem of Algeria cannot but meet the approval of those who believe in the principles of democracy and who seek a durable understanding among nations of the world."

"During his stay in London King was presented to King George VI at Buckingham Palace. His Majesty, wearing the uniform of an admiral of the fleet, received King in a sitting room where he was at work on papers. Whiskey or tea was offered, and as King had given up spirits for the duration of the war, he gladly accepted the tea, which was ready. The King reminisced agreeably about his cruises in the Royal Navy, and asked the admiral about his own with such tact that the audience, in retrospect, resembled a chat between a couple of old sailors. None of this comfortable atmosphere prevailed when General de Gaulle called at Claridge's to pay his respects to King and Marshall. Stark, who throughout the war skillfully conducted many negotiations with the Free French, had arranged the meeting. De Gaulle, feeling himself to be the head of a state, seemingly considered that he should be called upon, but as it had been pointed out that he had two stars, while Marshall and King had four, he presented himself at Claridge's, although with rather ill grace. He appeared at the proper time with a single aide, but conducted himself very stiffly, and after delivering himself of a long speech in French, in which he asked for many things that we needed ourselves at that moment, took his departure. It was scarcely a call calculated to make friends!"

"In the course of the Casablanca Conference, General de Gaulle, who was in London, had been invited by the Prime Minister to come to North Africa. De Gaulle was offended that he had not been invited further in advance, and in one way and another proved to be his usual difficult self. Mr. Eden, the Foreign Secretary, had to exert great pressure to induce him to leave London for Casablanca. When he arrived there the firmest treatment by Mr. Churchill was required to persuade him to call upon Giraud. Finally in the interests of at least good public feeling a "shot-gun marriage" was arranged. At a press conference on 24 January, De Gaulle and Giraud were made to sit in a row of chairs, alternating with Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Churchill, and to be photographed shaking hands. As the newsreel cameras finished their work, each French general dropped the other's hand as though it were red hot."

"Prior to the landings De Gaulle had made it clear that he wished to be definitely recognized as the ruler of France, and claimed that he alone had the right to give orders to the people of France. Once the landings had taken place these difficulties did not diminish, and the Joint Chiefs during their stay in England had a taste of these complications when De Gaulle undertook to change the regulations about the use of United States currency in France by American troops. The Joint Chiefs sent General Koenig, who, as the commander of the French forces of the interior, was serving as a direct subordinate of Eisenhower's in the Allied organization, and asked him what the difficulty was. It appeared that Koenig could not see De Gaulle's point either. As Eisenhower was troubled about the correct manner of managing civilian affairs in France until a proper organization could be set up, he asked the Joint Chiefs what to do, and they proposed that he at once send a message to the President, suggesting that if De Gaulle would not cooperate properly, another Frenchman be designated to manage French civilian affairs, and that De Gaulle be ignored, entirely. The Joint Chiefs did not stay to hear the answer from the President, but later that evening they received word that he had concurred."

"Charles de Gaulle (born 1890) spent two and a half years during the First World War as a prisoner of war in Wilhelmine Germany; in the Second, he initially commanded a tank regiment. Then, after the collapse of France, he rebuilt the political structure of France twice – the first time in 1944 to restore France’s essence, and the second time in 1958 to revitalize its soul and prevent civil war. De Gaulle guided France’s historical transition from a defeated, divided and overstretched empire to a stable, prosperous nation-state under a sound constitution. From that basis, he restored France to a significant and sustainable role in international relations."

"His [that is, Roosevelt's] determination to go his own way, his insistence on informing himself through his own idiosyncratic avenues of communication, his deliberate short-circuiting of the proper channels of responsibility- all these had defects of their virtues that now and then led him and the country astray. His two great failures were France and China. These historic civilizations of depth and pungent flavor, to which he was instinctively and without reluctance attracted, defeated his best efforts to incorporate them in an all-embracing view of the postwar world. In each instance he was badly advised, and there is no great artfulness needed to see where the bad advice came from and why he listened to it. But evidence was also available to him that de Gaulle was a far more powerful personage than he had imagined and Chiang Kai-shek was a far weaker one: he chose not to act on it. He wanted a revived but malleable France that would be willing to give up its empire and a united but nationalist China that would be a "great nation," able to fill the vacuum left by Japanese defeat. He got neither."

"When he was appointed to command the North African expedition, Eisenhower was briefed by Robert Murphy, our diplomatic representative there, on the "bewildering complexities" of the quarrels among not only the French factions but Spanish, Arab, Berber, German, and Russian as well. "Eisenhower listened with a kind of horrified fascination," wrote Murphy, "to my description of the possible complications... The General seemed to sense that this first campaign would present him with problems running the entire geopolitical gamut- it certainly did." What he could not have realized was that it would also place him in the crossfire between two towering political personalities, Franklin Roosevelt and Charles de Gaulle."

"The importance of the CAP to de Gaulle cannot be overestimated. At a critical cabinet meeting in August 1962, he called the stabilization of agriculture the "most important problem" facing France after the Algerian civil war. If the problems are not resolved, he declared, "we will have another Algeria on our own soil." By 1961...the CAP became the main focus of French EEC policy, dominating bilateral and multilateral meetings among ministers and heads of government."

"It is with deep regret that I have learned of your resignation as President of France. I have greatly valued the frank and comprehensive exchanges of views it has been my privilege to have with you, both as a private citizen and as Vice President and President of the United States. Nor shall I forget the courtesy of your welcome and the wisdom of your counsel during my recent visit to Paris. Our talks proved the occasion for a new departure in friendly cooperation between our two nations. We in the United States will not forget what you have done for France, both at home and abroad, and for the world, both in war and in peace. Mrs. Nixon joins me in sending you and Madame de Gaulle our warm personal regards and best wishes for the future."

"De Gaulle's greatness consists in the fact that, by two or three gestures of command in foreign affairs, he was suddenly able to transform the confusion of civil life in post-war France into a concerted harmony, to command renewed respect towards the institutions of the state, and to establish stable government where there had previously been chaos."

"It was the crucible of 1940 that transformed the obscure colonel of the battle of France... He emerged from it with his qualities of courage and self-reliance, audacity and daring, but also with his defects of ingratitude, vindictiveness, duplicity and prejudice; all inherent in the metal, but turned into steel by the ordeals of that terrible summer. In 1940 he proclaimed himself Joan of Arc. It was not long after the Dakar fiasco that he told the British Foreign Secretary, "Je suis la France". ... He did not need to learn from Churchill a creed we sometimes seem to have forgotten but would do well to remember: boundless love of country and complete faith in its destiny... de Gaulle, absolutely alone, has rebuilt his shattered country on the ruins of defeat, and has made France stronger, and her influence greater, than it has been for a century."

"Present at Casablanca but excluded from every talk that mattered was Charles de Gaulle. No one seemed to know quite what to do with him. But before the conference was over, his differences with the Allies had been patched up somewhat, and his future role had been much clarified."

"We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer's ink."

"Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. It steels itself to attain the absolute and authority; it wants to transfigure the world before having exhausted it, to set it to rights before having understood it. Whatever it may say, our era is deserting this world."

"Don't let them tell us stories. Don't let them say of the man sentenced to death "He is going to pay his debt to society," but: "They are going to cut off his head." It looks like nothing. But it does make a little difference. And then there are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye."

"Nous nous trompons toujours deux fois sur ceux que nous aimons: d'abord à leur avantage, puis à leur désavantage."

"A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images. And in a good novel, the whole of the philosophy has passed into the images. But if once the philosophy overflows the characters and action, and therefore looks like a label stuck on the work, the plot loses its authenticity and the novel its life. Nevertheless, a work that is to last cannot dispense with profound ideas. And this secret fusion between experiences and ideas, between life and reflection on the meaning of life, is what makes the great novelist."

"It is the failing of a certain literature to believe that life is tragic because it is wretched. Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would be almost easy to live. And M. Sartre's hero does not perhaps give us the real meaning of his anguish when he insists on those aspects of man he finds repugnant, instead of basing his reasons for despair on certain of man's signs of greatness. The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but the consequences and rules of action drawn from it."

"Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?"

"We have exiled beauty; the Greeks took up arms for her."

"Toute idée fausse finit dans le sang, mais il s'agit toujours du sang des autres. C'est ce qui explique que certains de nos philosophes se sentent à l'aise pour dire n'importe quoi."

"Simone Weil, je le sais encore maintenant, est le seul grand esprit de notre temps et je souhaite que ceux qui le reconnaissent en reçoivent assez de modestie pour ne pas essayer d'annexer ce témoignage bouleversant. Pour moi, je serais comblé si l'on pouvait dire qu'à ma place, et avec les faibles moyens dont je dispose, j'ai servi à faire connaître et à répandre son oeuvre dont on n'a pas encore mesuré tout le retentissement."

"One does not decide the truth of a thought according to whether it is right-wing or left-wing."

"O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer."

"Hungary conquered and in chains has done more for freedom and justice than any people for twenty years. But for this lesson to get through and convince those in the West who shut their eyes and ears, it was necessary, and it can be no comfort to us, for the people of Hungary to shed so much blood which is already drying in our memories. In Europe's isolation today, we have only one way of being true to Hungary, and that is never to betray, among ourselves and everywhere, what the Hungarian heroes died for, never to condone, among ourselves and everywhere, even indirectly, those who killed them. It would indeed be difficult for us to be worthy of such sacrifices."

"With rebellion, awareness is born."

"A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object."

"There is not love of life without despair about life."

"Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful."

"Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us to die."

"Life continues, and some mornings, weary of the noise, discouraged by the prospect of the interminable work to keep after, sickened also by the madness of the world that leaps at you from the newspaper, finally convinced that I will not be equal to it and that I will disappoint everyone—all I want to do is sit down and wait for evening. This is what I feel like, and sometimes I yield to it."

"Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower."

"Ce que, finalement, je sais de plus sûr sur la morale et les obligations des hommes, c'est au football que je le dois."

"If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."

"The direction of the world overwhelms me at this time. In the long run, all the continents (yellow, black and brown) will spill over onto Old Europe. They are hundreds and hundreds of millions. They are hungry and they are not afraid to die. We no longer know how to die or how to kill. We could preach, but Europe believes in nothing. So, we must wait for the year 1000 or a miracle. For my part, I find it harder and harder to live before a wall."

"Seulement, il faut du temps pour être heureux. Beaucoup de temps. Le bonheur lui aussi est une longue patience."

"Avoir de l'argent c'est se libérer de l'argent."

"It's better to bet on this life than on the next."

"It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about."

"To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre."

"Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory...Everything is forgotten, even great love."

"He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don't change character, men are dogs to one another."

"Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire."

"The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love."

"Fate is not in man but around him."

"Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. But I say to you that it is not America."

"I'm not an old, experienced hand at politics. But I am now seasoned enough to have learned that the hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning."

"I have learned that In quiet places, reason abounds, that in quiet people there is vision and purpose, that many things are revealed to the humble that are hidden from the great."