People From Paris

"Taking over from Arabs and Africans, it instituted the transatlantic slave trade, but it also engendered abolitionism and put an end to slavery before other nations did."

"[I]t is not hard to predict which one will crush the other once its objectives have been achieved. The Leftist intransigence that refuses any compromise with bourgeois society and cannot castigate too severely “little white men” actively collaborates with the most reactionary elements in the Muslim religion. But if the far Left courts this totalitarian theocracy so assiduously, it is perhaps less a matter of opportunism than of a real affinity. The far Left has never gotten over communism and once again demonstrates that its true passion is not freedom, but slavery in the name of justice."

"Europe got over the loss of its colonies much more quickly than the colonies got over their loss of Europe."

"The average European, whether male or female, is extremely sensitive, always ready to shoulder the blame for the poverty of Africa or Asia, to sorrow over the world’s problems, to assume responsibility for them, always ready to ask what Europeans can do for the South rather than asking what the South could do for itself."

"Naturally, we will continue to speak the double language of fidelity and rupture, to oscillate between being a prosecutor and a defense lawyer. That is our mental hygiene: we are forced to be both the knife and the wound, the blade that cuts and the hand that heals. The first duty of a democracy is not to ruminate on old evils, it is to relentlessly denounce its present crimes and failures. This requires reciprocity, with everyone applying the same rule. We must have done with the blackmail of culpability, cease to sacrifice ourselves to our persecutors. A policy of friendship cannot be founded on the false principle: we take the opprobrium, you take the forgiveness. Once we have recognized any faults we have, then the prosecution must turn against the accusers and subject them to constant criticism as well. Let us cease to confuse the necessary evaluation of ourselves with moralizing masochism. There comes a time when remorse becomes a second offence that adds to the first without cancelling it. Let us inject in others a poison that has long gnawed away at us: shame. A little guilty conscience in Tehran, Riyadh, Karachi, Moscow, Beijing, Havana, Caracas, Algiers, Damascus, Yangon, Harare, and Khartoum, to mention them alone, would do these governments, and especially their people, a lot of good. The fines gift Europe could give the world would be to offer it the spirit of critical examination that it has conceived and that has saved it from so many perils. It is a poisoned gift, but one that is indispensable for the survival of humanity."

"Every war, every crime against humanity among the damned of the Earth is supposed to be somewhat our fault and ought to lead us to confess our guilt, to pay endlessly for being a member of the bloc of wealthy nations."

"There is a twofold deception here: one side supports the Islamic veil or polygamy in the name of the struggle against racism and neocolonialism. The other side pretends to be attacking globalization in order to impose its version of religious faith."

"We are not going to confine women to the home, cover their heads, lengthen their skirts, or beat up gay people, prohibit alcohol, censure film, theater, and literature, and codify tolerance in order to respect the overly sensitive whims of a few sanctimonious persons."

"At that time, the Dalai Lama was much more accessible, I had breakfast with him and spend long moments alone with him."

"The Dalai Lama was little known, because he had never traveled abroad and was not yet a Nobel Prize winner, but he opened all the doors for me and I was able to film all the greats Tibetan masters, rinpothes and toulkus who had fled with him."

"Our world is questioning our position and that is where we must be strong in belief, following the teaching of the church. Facing the difficult reality, the temptation will be, of course, to take the easy way."

"Developing on another level, emotion is nonetheless, between automatism and objective action, a moment of psychic evolution. It forms the link between movement, which pre-exists, and consciousness, which it inaugurates. Incentives currently without outcome develop an erethism, the accumulated charge of which must explode, even if by transforming itself."

"Contrary to current opinion, the offensive is far from being the usual principle of anger. [...] or at the emotional exaltation there is a reversal of the combative fury of the subject against himself. But even if the orientation of the anger remains exclusively offensive, it only seems to set in motion the appropriate automatisms by the explosion of a diffuse agitation, which mixes with it, makes them stumble, and often ends up hitting them. of asynergy and adynamia, by resolving them into convulsion or syncope. They appear to be for her only a progressive, late, unstable conquest."

"We will study India with its philosophy and its myths, its literature, its laws and its language. Nay It is more than India it IS a page of the origin of the world that we will attempt to decipher."

"At that very time, however, now about forty years ago, a new start was made, which has given to Sanskrit scholarship an entirely new character. The chief author of that movement was Burnouf, then professor at the Collège de France in Paris, an excellent scholar, but at the same time a man of wide views and true historical instincts, and the last man to waste his life on mere Nalas and Sakuntalâs. Being brought up in the old traditions of the classical school in France (his father was the author of the well-known Greek Grammar), then for a time a promising young barrister, with influential friends such as Guizot, Thiers, Mignet, Villemain, at his side, and with a brilliant future before him, he was not likely to spend his life on pretty Sanskrit ditties. What he wanted when he threw himself on Sanskrit was history, human history, world-history, and with an unerring grasp he laid hold of Vedic literature and Buddhist literature, as the two stepping-stones in the slough of Indian literature."

"[The Bhagavad Gita was] "probably the most beautiful book which has ever come from the hand of man.""

"“When you have a dream you have to work hard to achieve that dream. Your dreams when you are young can be the force that keeps you going.”"

"“I would like to think those flights of mine have a small corner in the history of achievement. I always liked to say I travelled the world with a Gipsy.”"

"Maybe already the next generation [of tools] that is coming in 2024 could be very dangerous. Governments need to start preparing for this."

"[T]he mercy which will signalize the first days of our reign, will be invariably united with firmness: that love of our Subjects which leads us to be indulgent, teaches to be just. We shall forgive, without regret, those men, criminal as they are, who have led the People astray; but we shall treat with inexorable rigour, all those who may hereafter endeavour to seduce them from their duty. We will open our arms to those Rebels who may be induced by repentance to return to us; but if any of them should persist in rebellion, they will find that our indulgence will stop at the limits which justice prescribes, and that force will reduce those whom kindness has proved inadequate to attach."

"Impious and factious men, after having seduced you by false declamations, and by deceitful promises, hurried you into irreligion and revolt. Since that time, a torrent of calamities has rushed in upon you from every side. You proved faithless to the God of your forefathers; and that God, justly offended, has made you feel the weight of his anger; you rebelled against the authority which he had established, and a sanguinary Despotism, and an Anarchy not less fatal, have alternately continued to harrass you with incessant rage."

"Misfortune has removed the veil which was placed before your eyes; the harsh lessons of experience have taught you to regret the advantages which you have lost. Already do the sentiments of Religion, which shew themselves with eclat in all the provinces of the kingdom, present to our sight the image of the glorious ages of the Church! already does the impulse of your hearts, which brings you back to your King, declare that you feel the want of being governed by a Father."

"You must renounce the dominion of those treacherous and cruel usurpers who promised you happiness, but who have given you only famine and death; we wish to relieve you from their tyranny, which has so much injured you, to inspire you with the resolution of shaking it off. You must return to that holy religion which had showered down upon France the blessings of Heaven. We wish to restore its altars:—by prescribing justice to Sovereigns, and fidelity to subjects, it maintains good order, ensures the triumph of the laws, and produces the felicity of empires. You must restore that Government which, for 14 centuries, constituted the glory of France and the delight of her inhabitants; which rendered our Country the most flourishing of States, and yourselves the happiest of People:—It is our wish to restore it. Have not the various Revolutions which have occurred, augmented your distress, since the period of its destruction, and convinced you that it is the only Government that is fit for you?"

"It is not enough to groan beneath the yoke of your oppressors; you must be assisted in shaking it off. Show the world how the French, restored to their senses, can obliterate faults, in the commission of which their hearts were not concerned: Prove, that as Henry the Great has transmitted to us with his blood, his love of his people, so are you also the descendants of that people, one part of whom, always faithful to his cause, fought to restore him to his Throne; and the other part, abjuring a momentary error, bathed his feet with the tears of repentance:—Remember that you are the Grandsons of the Conquerors of Ivry and Fontain Francaise."

"It is a fact that universal suffrage, formerly feared by the Government as a species of monster, no longer frightens it to-day. Instructed by the examples of Napoleon III and Bismarck, statesmen finally came to understand that universal suffrage was essentially an approbative and ratificatory suffrage, while all the limited or property suffrages were disputative, unstable, and anarchical. In France two monarchies, the Restoration and the July Monarchy, made the experiment of the limited suffrage, and died of it; so that a wit was inspired to remark, not without justification, that if Charles X had granted the right of the vote to every Frenchman he would still have been on the throne."

"It anti-clericalism] was the major current in a rising tide of hostility against Charles X and his government."

"Where are you going, foreign traitor? Is this were you belong, misplaced bourgeoisie? Return to your little town, or you will perish by my hand."

"Thanks to Louis's Charte France had its first real experience of parliamentary monarchy... Louis was a genuinely constitutional monarch."

"Charles X, that much-diffamed King, and of whom M. Émile Ollivier was enabled to say that he was "aflame for the national revival," retook the road of exile without manifesting a shadow of the surprise and sorrow expressed by his minister Villèle, when he said that the Restauration had put France back in her place in Europe, giving her again order, rest, prosperity, though France did not seem to be aware of these benefits."

"My government was liable to commit errors: perhaps it did commit them. There are times when the purest intentions are insufficient to direct, or sometimes they even mislead. Experience alone could teach; it shall not be lost. All that can save France is my wish."

"We are Frenchmen—a title, which the crimes of a few individuals can no more degrade than the enormities of the Duke of Orleans can pollute the blood of Henry the Fourth. This title, which was ever dear to us, will also render us dear to those who bear it."

"My subjects have learned, by cruel trials, that the principle of the legitimacy of sovereigns is one of the fundamental bases of social order,—the only one upon which, amidst a great nation, a wise and well-ordered liberty can be established. This doctrine has just been proclaimed as that of all Europe. I had previously consecrated it be my charter, and I claim to add to that charter all the guarantees which can secure the benefits of it."

"I promise—I who never promised in vain (all Europe knows it)—to pardon to misled Frenchmen all that has passed since the day when I quitted Lille, amidst so many tears, up to the day when I re-entered Cambray, amidst so many acclamations. But the blood of my people has flowed, in consequence of a treason of which the annals of the world present no example. That treason has summoned foreigners into the heart of France. Every day reveals to me a new disaster. I owe it, then, to the dignity of my crown, to the interest of my people, to the repose of Europe, to except from pardon the instigators and authors of this horrible plot. They shall be designated to the vengeance of the laws by the two chambers, which I propose forthwith to assemble."

"Religious Worship must be re-established, the Hydra of Anarchy destroyed, the Regal Authority be restored to all its rights, before we can execute our intentions of opposing abuses of all kinds with invincible firmness; of seeking them with diligence, and of proscribing them with decision."

"Louis was by no means ill qualified to perform the part of his great ancestor Henry IV]. His understanding was excellent, his reading extensive, his temper mild and equal. He had no fanaticism political or religious. During the reign of his brother he had been one of those who wished to see the royal power restrained by constitutional checks... The excesses of the French revolution had alienated from the cause of liberty many who had once been warmly attached to it. But no such effect had been produced on the clear judgment and serene disposition of Louis... [H]istory owes him this honourable testimony, that he struggled long against the influence of bad advisers; that he yielded to it only when sickness, age, and domestic calamities had broken the force of his mind; that the best measures of his reign were those which he was himself concerned in preparing, and that his best ministers were those of his own free choice."

"More attractive than Louis XVIII, but less prudent also, his brother, the Count d'Artois, Charles X, did not know, as he did, how to be patient. He suffered and grew impatient over the reproach that liberals hurled at the monarchy, and which was their most efficacious weapon, that it had returned in "the caissons of the enemy," and that it had given its support to the shameful treaty of 1815. To efface these treaties as much as possible and to give grandeur and glory to France was the dominant idea of Charles X. He believed that he could in that way disarm an opposition whose "systematic" character he did not perceive."

"Unhappily, the republicans consulted their passions rather than their reason. The king would not have been a despot if he could, and could not have been a despot if he would. Napoleon, raised to the throne of France, would have both the inclination and the means. But Louis was the representative of the emigration, and Napoleon of the revolution. The men of the revolution, with a levity inexcusable in persons conversant with public affairs, preferred a vigorous, crafty, and remorseless tyrant, with a tri-coloured cockade, to a prince whose disposition was liberal, and whose government, though by no means faultless, was the best that they had ever known, but who wore a blue riband, and claimed the throne by a hereditary title."

"[The reign of Louis XVIII is] among the most glorious in the history of France."

"This insurrection had something in common with the ideas of the doctrinaires, of the liberals who had drawn up the Address, and of the middle classes who had elected them. It was an explosion of sentiments which Charles X had wished to appease through the glory of conquest; but Algeria was a ridiculous diversion for a people so addicted to tradition. The republican and Bonapartist ideas were confounded with the hatred for the treaties of 1815. "The combatants of the days of July," said Emile Bourgeois, "were not engaged in a riot like that of 1789. They had taken up arms against Europe at least as much as against Charles X and dreamed, above all, of a victorious Republic and of the Empire.""

"[You are] the son of Saint-Louis."

"To be Christian is to walk with Christ on His way, without dodging Golgotha in the impregnable confidence that the evils that can mark our lives and those of the world are known by Christ, taken in Him in the gift He makes of His life. And that thus they are held in the power of His Resurrection, which delivers us from fear and despair."

"Nellie Campobello, a great writer, published Cartucho (Cartridge) in 1931. Her explosive book was more like a grenade that laid bare the tragedy of the Mexican Revolution. In a succession of brief chapters, Nellie sketches a cruel, stark picture of the uprising as seen through the eyes of a little girl who was born before original sin. There are dead men-killed in battle or executed by firing squad-on every page. The girl eagerly watches from her window as men are shot down, and their corpses become her toys. When her favorite one is finally taken away, she misses it because it has entertained her for five days…If Nellie Campobello had not recorded her experiences, we would have been deprived of the most creative view of the Mexican Revolution ever written. Yes, I know, we have the writers Mariano Azuela, Martín Luis Guzmán, Rafael F. Muñoz, and the boring Francisco L. Urquizo, but there is no one as authentic as Nellie, no one who could say, as she did…Nellie Campobello-who wrote two novels, Cartucho and Las manos de mamá (A Mother's Hands)-was never granted the legendary status she deserves despite the fact that she is the only woman to have authored works about the Mexican Revolution. Her colleagues never acknowledged her nor paid her tribute of any kind, so much so that we are unsure exactly when and how she died."

"The locomotive was the main protagonist of the Mexican Revolution, but the Adelitas and Valentinas came a close second."

"I write in order to belong."

"We women treasure faces; in fact at any given moment life becomes a single face that we can touch with our lips."

"According to the El Paso Morning Times, in 1914 there were seventeen thousand men and four thousand women in Pancho Villa's army, but there are many other statistics that show that, without the soldaderas, there would have been no Mexican Revolution."

"Widows used to go around the way the poet Jaime Sabines would like them to: "There is one way, my love, that you could make me completely happy: die." Now widows are not even merry."

"I absorbed Mexico through the maids. A system still persists in Latin America which consists of privileged people having at their beck and call the poorest of the poor."

"in Latin America reality surpasses fiction."

"Working-class women's literature, women of color, specifically Latina women's writing like my friend Ana Castillo's, or my friend Cherrie Moraga's, Helena Viramontes's, Elena Poniatowska's, and Marguerite Duval's sends me all the way to my typewriter as much as Manuel Puig's stories."