Academics From France

"Power is no linger seen as inheriting its legitimacy from some divine authority; it is a mere convention which we adhere to because we are born and educated into it, and because we see others conform to it. Its strength lies in the fact that we believe that others believe in it: power is no more than the illusion of power. The exercise of power is a constant fight to keep up appearances."

"Well, it has been a long time since manna last fallen from heaven. We cannot live alone; we rely on others to produce the stuff of our material and intellectual life, and we have to organize society so that its members will cooperate toward the common good."

"What is needed is courage: it is always so much easier to accept what you are being told than to think for yourself."

"The social world is not driven by natural laws and randomness alone, as the physical world is, but also by human wills."

"Many great failures and many great successes are due to chance and not to human folly or ingenuity."

"An equilibrium is not always an optimum; it might not even be good. This may be the most important discovery of game theory."

"In the struggle for life, or in the struggle for power, there is no reason why their victory would make the world better than it was. There is no invisible hand guiding these processes, dealing out victory to the most deserving. Chance is their leader."

"Chaos cuts with two edges. We have seen how it is impossible to retrieve past history from current observations. We will now show that it is impossible to predict future states from the current observations."

"It is a testimony to the power of education that classical mechanics could operate for so long under a mistaken conception. Teaching and research concentrated on integrable systems, each feeding the other, until in the end we had no longer the tools nor the interest for studying nonintegrable systems."

"The transition from integrable to non integrable systems is quiet interesting to observe."

"The measurement of time was the first example of a scientific discovery changing the technology."

"If there is a God, he has left no tracks in the laws of physics; or if he has, he has covered them up very well."

"We do not discover mathematical truths; we remember them from our passages through this world outside our own."

"The world is full, at every scale, and every scale ignores the higher and lower ones."

"So every possible reality, once God gives it existence, will reveal its own identity. Its life will unfold slowly, whereas God encompasses it at a single glance."

"The optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears that this might be the case."

"Nowadays, however, we are much more aware of the fact that the best proof in the world is worth no more than its premises: every scientific theory is transitory and provisional, in wait for a better one, and accepted only as long as the experimental results conform to its predictions."

"The moment when the scientists became engineers was a historical turning point."

"This text is, in fact, a rerun of a great part of the substance of the constitutional treaty."

"Europe without Greece is like a child without a birth certificate"

"Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of a figure like De Gaulle, but of Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions, and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the 1970s, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s, and the arrival in power in the 1990s of a postwar generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone."

"Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals we dare not present to them directly. (...) This approach of 'divide and ratify' is clearly unacceptable. Perhaps it is a good exercise in presentation. But it would confirm to European citizens the notion that European construction is a procedure organised behind their backs by lawyers and diplomats."

"Vous n'avez pas, M. Mitterrand, le monopole du cœur. (You do not have, Mr Mitterrand, the monopoly of heart)."

"Yet, alongside Western weaknesses, there were also serious problems for the Soviet system, while the American position was less bleak, in both absolute and relative terms, than the successive electoral defeats of presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in presidential elections in 1976 and 1980 might suggest. Moreover, the failure of the Communists to benefit substantially from the changes in Portugal, Spain and Greece was matched by Communist weakness elsewhere in Western Europe. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, French President from 1974 to 1981, and Helmut Schmidt, German Chancellor from 1974 to 1982, combined to act as a very strong stabilising force and to relaunch the EEC project. Within the Socialist International, the so-called Socialist Triangle of Willy Brandt, Olof Palme, Swedish Prime Minister, and Bruno Kreisky, Austrian Chancellor, was dominant. In Italy, the Communist Party, the most powerful in Western Europe, adopted a ‘Euro-Communism’ that was opposed to Soviet direction. Enrico Berlinguer, who became Party Secretary in 1973, a key figure, was committed to the existing democratic system and pursued what was termed the ‘historic compromise’ with the established Christian Democrat-dominated political system. A pact was negotiated in 1976, with the Communist Party agreeing not to try to overthrow the Christian Democratic government. Euro-Communism was a term coined in 1975 by Western European Communist leaders keen to demonstrate their democratic credentials. More generally in Western Europe, the declining position of heavy industries was a challenge to the trade unions that were central to left-wing political parties, and notably to the Communists."

"The rejection of the Constitutional treaty by voters in France was a mistake that should be corrected."

"Undaunted, the Brussels establishment continued to pursue unification. By 2005 it had sought to adopt a new constitution, overseen by the veteran French politician Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. This awarded the EU a third presidency (now of the European Council as well as its Commission and Parliament), and further extended majority voting in the European Council. This ran into immediate trouble. Rarely in the EU’s history were the peoples of Europe directly consulted on its powers, or even its existence. Decisions were taken by elected governments. The Giscard constitution was rejected in French and Dutch referendums, and the final treaty by the Irish. These votes were either rerun or ignored. The final Treaty of Lisbon was signed in 2007, with virtually no concessions to subsidiary nationalism, its authors blind to any incipient resentment it might breed."

"The man of the past."

"When one's function is to teach the loftiest wisdom, it is difficult to resist the temptation to believe that until you have spoken, nothing has been said."

"For to love is to give what one is, his very being, in the most absolute, the most brazenly metaphysical, the least phenomenalizable sense of this word."

"It is impossible for a Christian to be a relativist."

"It has never been recommended to confuse "loving" with "seeking to please"… ...Salome pleased Herod's guests; I can hardly believe she was burning with love for them. As for poor John the Baptist... ...she certainly did not envelop him in her love."

"In point of fact, Western philosophy has never set itself free of Christianity: wherever Christianity did not have a hand in the construction of modern philosophy it served instead as a stumbling block."

"The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher."

"To philosophize man must put his whole soul into play, in much the same manner that to run he must use his heart and lungs."

"The day when efficacy would prevail over truth will never come for the Church, for then the gates of hell would have prevailed against her."

"To redeem creation the saint wages war on the entire fabric of creation, with the bare weapons of truth and love."

"With all his sincerity and devotion, the authentic, absolute atheist is after all only an abortive saint, and at the same time, a mistaken revolutionist."

"The first step to be taken by everyone who wishes to act morally is to decide not to act according to the general customs and doings of his fellow-men."

"Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment. Here we have the first internal inconsistency of contemporary atheism: it proclaims that all religion must necessarily vanish away, and it is itself a religious phenomena."

"The supernatural light of the spirit is the only night from which the spirit can emerge alive."

"A community of free men cannot exist if its spiritual base is not solely law."

"Not only does the democratic state of mind stem from the inspiration of the Gospel, but it cannot exist without it."

"The hope of the coming of a new Christian era in our civilization is to my mind a hope for a distant future, a very distant future."

"In loving things and the being in them man should rather draw things up to the human level than reduce humanity to their measure."

"It is not possible to escape from the results of the irruption of faith into the structures of our knowledge."

"Nothing is more vain than to seek to unite men by a philosophic minimum."

"There is nothing man desires more than a heroic life: there is nothing less common to men than heroism."

"There is room neither for the poet nor for the contemplator in an egalitarian world."

"Whereas the intelligence of God is both the cause and the measure of the truth of things, things are both the cause and the measure of the truth of our intelligence."

"The philosopher says that God's knowledge is the measure of things, and that things are the measure of man's knowledge."