People From Paris

"Hébert's method provided a renewed focus on functionality and an altruistic approach to training. He also stressed the necessity of being outdoors and simplified the equipment."

"Any physical education method should include two components: a learning part aimed at educating the body, improving endurance, strength and flexibility, teaching the basic techniques for elementary and practical exercises like walking, running, jumping, lifting, climbing, throwing, swimming and defending; and an application part aimed at developing to the highest degree the practical abilities, putting them to use, and providing the means to cope with many real life situations."

"The car stopped and a general in a magnificent uniform stepped out; he was wearing a monocle and his chest was covered with decorations. He was a most corpulent man, strong-looking with wide shoulders, extremely stiff in manner, imposing, and what seemed to me a terribly Prussian appearance. The expression on his face was hard, his lips tight, his gestures frigid. I kept myself modestly to one side, watching this character and thinking to myself that it would not be easy to deal with him."

"During this summer [of 1906] the strain between Father and Mother grew deeper. … A young Tolstoyan by the name of Lebrun, whom Father loved very much, lived with us at this time and helped Father."

"A genius, an eighty-two year-old thinker and author, loved and respected by the whole world, having to flee like a criminal from his own home! To flee from the bottomless abyss created between persons having dissimilar guiding instincts! Through the cold impenetrable autumn night, Tolstoy ran alone to the nearest stable through the large apple orchard. And behind him, the terrifying specter of being caught and again made to drown in the insufferable surroundings in which he had been suffocated for all of thirty years! Before him, finally, lay moral freedom, so long and so earnestly awaited! Finally, the possibility, though not for long, though only until death, of relief from the pressures on his mind! The possibility of carrying out his much revered duty before his conscience and before toiling humankind! He had been hindered in life. Now he can at last succeed in dying with dignity."

"The fate of all founders of moral and religious schools did not escape Tolstoy. He had three types of disciples: those of one type looked after their own internal improvement and had, so to say, a poor opinion of all practical actions. They are the followers of the letter of the law. Very rarely does one encounter persons like this among Tolstoyans. Those of another type left their studies or privileged situations and went to live among the people, maintaining themselves by farming or the trades. They are the men of goodwill on humankind's labor front. Those of the third and final type do not reject their special skills, through which they serve the people and true progress. They are the friends of the people."

"“Leo Nicolayevich, what is madness?” I asked him … The reply followed. “It is selfishness,” he explained, “the narrowing of one's attention to oneself and afterward to any single idea.”"

"In the spiritual world, just as in the physical world, nothing is lost. Where an ember quietly glows, even a breeze can fan a blaze. Just as he instructed me, Tolstoy's powerful call touched millions of hearts and intellects."

"Nature is like a woman worthy of being placed on a pedestal. In order fully to understand and appreciate her, it is necessary to live with her a long time in intimate proximity."

"Persistent and undiscerning almost to the point of criminality as far as resources were concerned, this woman [Sophia Tolstaya] was of immeasurable hindrance to her husband, her children and humankind as a whole."

"It is indeed a striking thought that the same region of central Italy twice, in the shape of ancient Etruria and modern Tuscany, been the source of civilization in Italy. Since the seventh century BC and from the fifteenth century onwards, in the dawn of antiquity as well as at the beginning of modern times, the same region of the peninsula has been distinguished by exceptional qualities. The birth and re-birth or Renaissance of Italy had the same cradle."

"Quite often the young person is horrified at innocent animals being driven to the slaughterhouse to satisfy the appetites of the human species which could easily feed itself in other ways."

"In becoming a vegetarian, you will eat a greater percentage of your calories from cereal grains, dried beans and peas, potatoes and pasta—the very foods most dieters avoid with zeal. And you will lose weight."

"[The] enormous appetite for animal products has forced the conversion (at a very poor rate) of more and more grain, soybean and even fish meal into feed for cattle, hogs and poultry, thus decreasing the amounts of food directly available for direct consumption by the poor."

"[Vegetarianism] has three things going for it all at once—economics, health and compassion."

"A small, bespectacled man who became an American citizen after the war but never lost his French accent or Gallic jauntiness, Dr. Mayer (pronounced my-YAIR), was a perfect blend of European intellectual and American pragmatist: a charming, talkative, often stubborn educator who pushed the frontiers of knowledge in the laboratory and fought hunger and malnutrition wherever they flourished."

"They will return, these Gods you have never stopped longing for. Time will bring back the order of ancient days."

"The Cantal of Auvergne corresponds to the Cantal of the Himalayas. The Merovingians are Indians or Persians or Trojans . . . . Is it not highly important to clarify these relationships, migrations and filiations, at least with somewhat more care and research than has been devoted to them so far?"

"When Frenchmen were in good health, when their intelligence was sound and vigorous, the idea of tradition was no less foreign to them than was the idea of revolution. The notion of returning to the chansons de geste and Saint Louis's oak tree would have seemed as ridiculous to them as wearing their fathers' breeches and hats out of filial piety."

"In order to avoid being unsettled by Bolshevism and its substitutes, one must be conscious of the superiority of Western civilization."

"In countries where, as in France, there is still an agricultural population and a majority of propriétaires, one need not fear social subversion."

"Do people really think that everything will be finished when we evacuate the Rhineland? On the contrary, it is certain that everything will begin, that the territorial demands will follow."

"One of the greatest mistakes that the Western world has committed, is to imagine that the colored peoples, in acceding to its type of civilization, would be drawing nearer to it."

"The Rhineland liberated from Prussia or eternal war. The choice is ours."

"[The significance of the Nazi gains in the 1930 election lay] neither in Hitler nor in his one-hundred-seven deputies [but rather in] the facility with which the German people follow those who recommend violence."

"Bainville predicted everything that has been happening, I wanted to believe that he was having a nightmare, that he was wrong... But here we are."

"Bainville transformed history from a conjectural science into an exact science."

"Like Maurras he sees clearly but unlike Maurras and Daudet, he does not provoke controversy. This is an advantage, and a king has the same advantage, as the English know. He is above party. In the world of thought Bainville is above dispute. You will see, he will become a criterion."

"Jacques Bainville, born 1879, met Maurras after his first journey to Germany, and willingly accepted the solutions of the older man for the alarming problem of Germany's superior power. After that, Germany never let him go. (In contrast to Maurras, he was acquainted with Germany by thorough observation and wide knowledge of its literature.) Narrower than Maurras intellectually but broader in understanding, he went beyond the "sectlike character" of the Action Française without ever abandoning it, for, in his own lofty words, he owed Maurras "tout, sauf le jour." However, the renown of his clear and apparently moderate spirit outshone that of the master's; he died in 1936, just after being appointed to Poincaré's chair in the Académie Française."

"Poincaré has the highest esteem for you. Probably he envies you your right as a newspaperman to tell the French truths that he has not been able to tell them in the place he has occupied."

"That fine spirit, that sad and dear Cassandra, did not have to consult the gods to see clearly but depended solely on his knowledge of history."

"Unique in its crystalline irrefutability, Bainville's luminous column guides me unerringly across the desert of foreign policy."

"The real Hitler did not exist before those years of hardship in Vienna, where he simultaneously discovered the dangers of Marxism and of Jewish World-Ascendancy. His real birth as a man of action dates from the day on which he discovered ethnology. It is in this department that a Frenchman is bound to find Mein Kampf singularly inadequate, singularly elementary. If we had to judge these fighting books by the same canons as we judge works of the mind, it is certain that the National Socialist Bible would not bear a moment's examination. The most puerile absurdities mingle with the most dubious scientific hypotheses, all couched in language whose pedantry, though it take one's breath away, probably contributed in large measure to the book's success with German readers."

"Perhaps in a sense the man [Adolf Hitler] will always elude us, but this much is certain: it is on him that all the hopes of the Germany that was vanquished in 1918 are centred. Our socialists are all at sea about him. Every step forward that he took, they said his fall was imminent. He mirrors too faithfully certain aspects of his country, for that fall, even if it occurs, to be of much account. But the important thing is to know him, not to suffer ourselves to be misled by his rudimentary and inchoate ideas. Beneath a very elementary philosopher, there leaps to the eye a politician who knows what he wants and whose position makes him, however vehemently he may declare and believe himself the contrary, France's most formidable antagonist."

"He had, by 1900, formed most of the main ideas that were to dominate his writings: hatred of disorder, romanticism, liberalism, democracy, internationalism, the French Revolution, and Germany."

"Bainville has dated Michelet and Aulard."

"[O]f far greater influence on public opinion was the appearance of Bainville's Histoire de deux peuples, which, like all Bainville's books, was distributed through very large printings and contributed, almost more than any other work, to the undermining of the revolutionary-democratic-socialist viewpoint and to the strengthening of the conviction that the dismemberment and impotence of Germany were indispensable to France's peace and greatness."

"Human history is a record of struggles between those who save and those who spend, between producers and consumers. These struggles have sometimes assumed the character of civil wars. It is the case of one tribe wanting to appropriate the more fertile soil and wealth of another tribe, or else within the same tribe, the have-nots wanting to expropriate the haves."

"When one has millions and millions of yellow and black subjects what a strange idea it is to proclaim the principle of popular self-determination."

"Dictatorships are like a good many other things in this world. They can be the best, or the worst, form of government. There are some excellent dictatorships, and there are some hateful ones."

"May 7, 1919 has not erased the date of January 18, 1871."

"It is no mere caprice that has led us to connect a disordered currency with the emergence of despotic forms of government. The one precedes, and often begets, the other, because, for the vast majority of people, it is the most obvious symptom of national disintegration. This, again, is one reason why dictatorships are not all assignable to a common cause. A dictatorship may be a defensive reaction against anarchy and ruin, and against the effects of democracy carried to its ultimate conclusion, that is to say, to socialism and communism. On the other hand, it offers to a democracy fired with equalitarian and anti-capitalist zeal, the means of overthrowing the forces arrayed against it, and of enthroning itself in their place."

"A Peace Treaty too Lenient for the Harshness it Contains [Une Paix trop douce pour ce qu'elle a de dur]."

"Where do we find the first example of the modern dictator? In England. And what is England? The "Mother of Parliaments". The country which adopted for itself, and distributed in facsimile throughout the world, the form of parliamentary government. Cromwell makes us wonder whether a dictator is not a necessary concomitant of revolutions, of the rise of democracies and of the establishment of the parliamentary system."

"The more one studies, with the attention and sympathy one owes to noble undertakings, the rise of the Italian Dictator, the more we must hope that this great wave of national enthusiasm will not blind him, in the end, to those perils to which a revolution is particularly exposed, and Fascism is, first and foremost, a revolution. Those who want France to follow suit, will do well to think twice about it. The ‘Corporative Economy’ devised by Mussolini would be regarded as monstrous by our middle class and our traders, big and small. Before we think about copying a thing, we ought to know exactly what it is we are going to copy. The Gallic cock is not designed by nature to suck the dugs of the Roman wolf."

"The more I got to know [Bainville]...the more I felt myself conquered. That perfect and sober courtesy, the remarkable freedom of his thought, the elegant way in which he concealed the enormity of the labor that he accomplished each day, the charming absence of illusions and the taste for the true value of works and men, rendered him ever more desirable to see and converse with."

"Having erased Sedan, we now must erase Waterloo. France cannot be a great continental power unless she is a Rheinish power... French political wisdom has never consisted in immoderate acquisitions. In the days of France's European hegemony, she always preferred influence and infiltration to indigestion."

"If Germany were to become Bolshevik we would be absolutely delighted. We wish it with all our heart. France has never been secure except when anarchy ruled in Germany... From a Bolshevished Germany, we would no longer have to fear what we underwent in 1870 and 1914."

"Monarchist or collectivist, Germany will not change its nature."

"Nothing is more false than the axiom that governments are belligerent and peoples are pacific."