Politicians From France

"Aristotle's pupil already realized that we have no power at all over our passions as long as we do not know their true causes. Many men have refuted fear, and with sound arguments. But a man who is afraid does not listen to arguments; he listens to the beating of his heart and the pulsating of his blood."

"It is clear that in mulling over harsh judgments, sinister predictions, and bad memories, we fashion our own sadness; in a certain sense, we savor it."

"In short, the important thing is to get started. No matter how; then there will be time to ask yourself where you are going."

"We must clear away, simplify, eradicate."

"Our errors perish before we do. Let's not mummify them and keep them around."

"Everybody continually tries to get away with as much as he can; and society is a marvelous machine which allows decent people to be cruel without realizing it."

"Politeness is for people toward whom we feel indifferent, and moods, both good and bad, are for those we love."

"Humanity will have to extricate itself from the bags created by false moralists, according to whom we taste happiness and then pass judgment on it, as if it were a piece of fruit. But I maintain that even for a piece of fruit we can do something to help it taste good. This is even truer of marriage and every other human relationship; these things are not meant to be tasted or passively accepted; they must be made. A relationship is not like a bit of shade where one is comfortable or uncomfortable depending on the weather and the way the wind is blowing. On the contrary, it is a place of miracles, where the magician makes the rain and the good weather."

"Any kind of barbarism, once established, will last."

"Idleness is the mother of all vices, but also of all virtues."

"In short, the anomaly of war is that the best men get themselves killed while crafty men find their chance to govern in a manner contrary to justice."

"May the Gods, if they did not die of boredom, never give you one of those flat kingdoms to govern; may lead you through mountain paths; may they give you for a companion a good Andalusian mule with eyes like wells, a brow like an anvil, and who stops dead in his tracks because he sees the shadow his ears make on the road in front of him."

"Work is the best and worst of all things; the best of it is voluntary, the worst of it is servile."

"Every menial condition is bearable as long as one can exercise authority over one's work and be assured that the job is permanent."

"We are advised and led along by second-rate moralists who only know how to work themselves into a delirium and pass their illness onto others."

"One must preach life, not death; spread hope, not fear and cultivate joy, man's most valuable treasure. That is the secret of the greatest of the wise, and it will be the light of tomorrow. Passions are sad. Hatred is sad. Joy destroys passions and hatred. Let us begin by telling ourselves that sadness is never noble, beautiful or useful."

"An author of antiquity said that every event has two handles, and that, in order to carry it, there is no sense in choosing the one that hurts the hand."

"Certainly thinking is pleasant, but the pleasure of thinking must be subordinated to the art of making decisions."

"Obligation spoils everything."

"Never be insolent unless it is a deliberate decision, and only toward a man more powerful than yourself."

"Happiness is a reward that comes to those that have not looked for it."

"Each one gave the other the only assistance one man can expect from another: that his friend support him and ask only that he remain himself. It is no great accomplishment to take people as they are, and we must always do so eventually, but to wish them to be as they are, that is a genuine love."

"Untie, liberate, and do not be afraid. He who is free is disarmed."

"It is very true that we ought to think of the happiness of others; but it is not often enough said that the best thing we can do for those who love us is to be happy ourselves."

"When the pack is out hunting, the dogs do not fight among themselves."

"We must tell the Algerians that it is not the case that they need France, but that France needs them. They are not a burden, and if they are for now, they will on the contrary be a dynamic part as well as the young blood of the French nation into which we will have integrated them. I claim that in the Muslim religion there is nothing, in the moral point of view, that would be incompatible with making a believing or practicing Muslim a full French citizen. Very much on the contrary, its basic principles are the same as for Christianity, which is the basis of Western civilization. On the other hand, I do not believe that there exists an Algerian race, any more than there exists a French race … I conclude: let us offer to Algerian Muslims entrance and integration in a dynamic France. Instead of telling them as we do now: "you are very expensive, you are a burden", let us tell them: "we need you, you are the youth of the nation.""

"Lamartine, at the Hotel de Ville, in Paris, in 1848, produced an instantaneous effect that few orators have surpassed."

"The first romantics were seers without even really realizing it: their soul’s education began by accident: abandoned trains still smoking, occasionally taking to the tracks. Lamartine was a seer now and again, but strangling on old forms. Hugo, too pigheaded, certainly saw in his most recent works: Les Misérables is really a poem. I’ve got Les Chatiments with me; Stella gives some sense of Hugo’s vision. Too much Belmontet and Lamennais with their Jehovahs and colonnades, massive crumbling edifices."

"The doctrine of the cynics is the Ideal reversed, the parody of physical and moral beauty, the crime of mind, the degradation of imagination. I could not take pleasure in it. There was too much enthusiasm within me to permit me to crawl through those sinks of the brain. My nature had wings. The dangers to which I was exposed were above, not below."

"Until the age of twelve, then, I only lived on bread, milk-food, vegetables, and fruit. My health was not less robust on this account, nor my growth less rapid, and it was to this diet, perhaps, that I was indebted for that purity of feature, that exquisite sensibility of feeling, and that serene gentleness of humor and character which I had preserved up to that period."

"My mother took me to town with her, and made me pass, as if by accident, through the yard of a slaughter-house. I saw some men, their arms naked and besmeared with blood, knocking a bull in the head; others cutting the throats of calves and sheep, and separating their still heaving limbs. Streams of smoking gore ran along the pavement. An intense feeling of pity, mingled with horror, seized upon me. I asked to be led away quickly. The thought of these scenes, the necessary preliminaries of one of those dishes of meat which I had so often seen on the table, made me take a disgust to animal food and inspired me with a horror for butchers."

"My mother was convinced, and on this head I have retained her firm belief, that to kill animals for the purpose of feeding on their flesh is one of the most deplorable and shameful infirmities of the human state; that it is one of those curses cast upon man either by his fall, or by the obduracy of his own perversity. She believed, and I am of the same belief, that these habits of hard-heartedness towards the gentlest animals, our companions, our auxiliaries, our brethren in toil and even in affection here below; that these immolations, these sanguinary appetites, this sight of palpitating flesh, are calculated to brutalize the instincts of the heart and make them ferocious. She believed, and I am of the same belief, that this nurture, which is seemingly much more succulent and much more energetic, contains in itself active causes of irritation and putridity, which sour the blood and shorten the days of mankind. In support of these ideas of abstinence, she quoted the innumerable gentle and pious tribes of India who deny themselves all that has had life; and the strong and healthy races of the shepherds and even of the laboring classes of our fields."

"The very eagle, destined to soar so high and to see so far, begins his life in the fissures of the rocks, and in his early days only sees the arid and sometimes fetid borders of his eyry."

"My God! I have often regretted that I was born! I have often wished to fall back even into nothingness, rather than advance through so many falsehoods, so many sufferings, and so many successive losses, towards that loss of ourselves which we call death! Still, even in those moments of terrible faintheartedness, when despair overmasters reason, and when man forgets that life is a task imposed upon him to finish, I have always said to myself: "There are some things which I would regret not to have tasted — a mother's milk, a father's love, that relationship of heart and soul between brothers, household affections, joys, and even cares!" Our family is evidently our second self, more than self, existing before self, and surviving self with the better part of self. It is the image of the holy and loving unity of beings revealed by the small group of creatures who hold to one another, and made visible by feeling!"

"Silence is the winding-sheet of the past: it is sometimes impious, often dangerous to raise it. But even when it is raised piously and lovingly, the first moment is a cruel one."

"Never has a man set for himself, voluntarily or involuntarily, a more sublime aim, since this aim was super human; to subvert superstitions which had been imposed between man and his Creator, to render God unto man and man unto God; to restore the rational and sacred idea of divinity amidst the chaos of the material and disfigured gods of idolatry, then existing. Never has a man undertaken a work so far beyond human power with so feeble means, for he Muhammad had in the conception as well as in the execution of such a great design, no other instrument than himself and no other aid except a handful of men living in a corner of the desert. Finally, never has a man accomplished such a huge and lasting revolution in the world, because in less than two centuries after its appearance, Islam, reigned over the whole of Arabia, and conquered, in God's name, Persia, Khorasan, Transoxania, Western India, Syria, Egypt, Abyssinia, all the known continent of Northern Africa, numerous islands of the Mediterranean Sea, Spain and part of Gaul. If greatness of purpose, smallness of means, and astounding results are the three criteria of human genius, who could dare to compare any great man in modern history with Muhammad? The most famous men created arms, laws and empires only. They founded, if anything at all, no more than material powers which often crumbled away before their eyes. This man moved not only armies, legislations, empires, peoples and dynasties, but millions of men in one-third of the then inhabited world; and more than that, he moved the altars, the gods, the religions, the ideas, the beliefs and souls. . . his forbearance in victory, his ambition, which was entirely devoted to one idea and in no manner striving for an empire; his endless prayers, his mystic conversations with God, his death and his triumph after death; all these attest not to an imposture but to a firm conviction which gave him the power to restore a dogma. This dogma was twofold, the unity of God and the immateriality of God; the former telling what God is, the latter telling what God is not; the one overthrowing false gods with the sword, the other starting an idea with words. Philosopher, orator, apostle, legislator, warrior, conqueror of ideas, restorer of rational dogmas, of a cult without images; the founder of twenty terrestrial empires and of one spiritual empire, that is Muhammad. As regards all standards by which human greatness may be measured, we may well ask, is there any man greater than he?"

"Si la grandeur du dessein, la petitesse des moyens, l'immensité du résultat sont les trois mesures du génie de l'homme, qui osera comparer humainement un grand homme de l'histoire moderne à Mahomet?"

"The more I see of the representatives of the people, the more I admire my dogs."

"Experience is the only prophecy of wise men."

"Les utopies ne sont souvent que des verités prématurées."

"What is our life but a succession of preludes to that unknown song whose first solemn note is sounded by death?"

"Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens."

"Love alone was left, as a great image of a dream that was erased."

"Let us love the passing hour, let us hurry up and enjoy our time."

"I say to this night: "Pass more slowly"; and the dawn will come to dispel the night."

"O time, arrest your flight! and you, propitious hours, arrest your course! Let us savor the fleeting delights of our most beautiful days!"

"Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated."

"My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen. Even when I am not in sympathy with the person, I have to be in love with him or her while I'm doing their portrait. Le Pen adored me (at least until his photo ran alongside Hitler's in Le Monde), and we got on extremely well."

"[A]nyone interested in fighting Le Pen-style fascism or Sharon-style brutality has to deal with the reality of anti-Semitism head-on. The hatred of Jews is a potent political tool in the hands of both the right in Europe and in Israel. For Mr. Le Pen, anti-Semitism is a windfall, helping spike his support from 10 per cent to 17 per cent in a week...whenever hatred of Jews diminishes, the likes of Jean-Marie Le Pen shrink right down with it."

"In the wake of Jean-Marie Le Pen's capture of 17 percent of the vote in the first round of France's presidential election, the French Establishment, too, has shown great tolerance for fascist tactics in resisting any rebirth of the European Right. ... Though Le Pen has made radical and foolish statements, there is no evidence he is a Nazi. His hero is not Hitler but Joan of Arc, and he and his National Front have accepted defeat in every election they have lost. No, Le Pen is hated and feared not just for who he is, but for the issues he has raised. … As it is often the criminal himself who is first to cry, "Thief!" so it is usually those who scream, "Fascist!" loudest who are the quickest to resort to anti-democratic tactics. Today, the greatest threat to the freedom and independence of the nations of Europe comes not from Le Pen and that 17 percent of French men and women who voted for him. It comes from an intolerant European Establishment that will accept no rollback of its powers or privileges, nor any reversal of policies it deems "progressive.""