French Politician Quotes

Napoleon I of France

Charles de Gaulle

Maximilien Robespierre

Emmanuel Macron

Nicolas Sarkozy

François Hollande

Napoleon III

I talk. It is necessary. Action puts the passions to work, but it is speech that arouses them.

Charles de Gaulle

Everyone sees drama from his own perspective. My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks. The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims. For some the most terrible aspect of it was the deportations, while for others it was the leveling bombings or the mass deaths by starvation and cold.

Jean-Marie Le Pen

It is with regret that I pronounce the fatal truth: Louis must die that the country may live.

Maximilien Robespierre

Some audacity, more audacity, always audacity and the Fatherland will be saved!

In my opinion physicians kill as many people as we generals.

Napoleon I of France

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

Cardinal Richelieu

No nostalgia runs deeper than that for something one has never known and now cannot obtain.

I believe in the forces of the spirit, and I won't leave you.

François Mitterrand

Tilling and grazing are the two breasts that feed France.

Maximilien de Béthune

The domain in which chemical synthesis exercises its creative power is vaster than that of nature herself.

Marcellin Berthelot

Freedom is when one hears the bell at 7 o'clock in the morning and knows it is the milkman and not the Gestapo.

Georges Bidault

Long, so long, have you held the warrior's black face Between your hands as if it glowed already with some deadly Twilight. From the hillside I have seen the sun set In the bays of your eyes. When will I see my country again, The pure horizon of your face? When will I sit again At the table of your dark breasts?

Léopold Sédar Senghor

Every unjust act, even committed for the sake of a just cause, carries its curse with it.

The formation of planets is like a gigantic snowball fight. The balls bounce off, break apart, or stick together, but in the end they are rolled up into one enormous ball, a planet-ball that has gathered up all the snowflakes in the surrounding area.

Claude Allègre

The high contracting powers solemnly declare…that they condemn recourse to war and renounce it…as an instrument of their national policy towards each other…The settlement or the solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be which may arise…shall never be sought by either side except by pacific means.

Aristide Briand

When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.

Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette

Five or six hundred [aristocratic] heads lopped off would have assured you repose and happiness; a false humanity has restrained your arm and suspended your blows; it will cost the lives of millions of your brothers.

Jean-Paul Marat

It is simply, and solely, the abundance of money within a state [which] makes the difference in its grandeur and power.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert

For us the mountains had been a natural field of activity where, playing on the frontiers of life and death, we had found the freedom for which we were blindly groping and which was as necessary to us as bread.

After us the deluge.

Madame de Pompadour

Putin rejected the diplomatic path and chose the path of war. We will take full responsibility for defending the sovereignty of our allies.

Emmanuel Macron

To judge of the real importance of an individual, one should think of the effect his death would produce.

Pierre Marc Gaston de Lévis, Duke of Lévis

On your feet, you damned souls of the earth! On your feet, inmates of hunger's prison!

Eugène Edine Pottier

Federalism is a guideline, not a pornographic word, you can speak it out loud... We have been focusing too much on a country that has said no, no, no!

Friends, more often than you think, upon the spot
Where gleams the spangle, you will find the blot.

Antoine-Vincent Arnault