French Politician Quotes

Let the progress of the meal be slow, for dinner is the last business of the day; and let the guests conduct themselves like travelers due to reach their destination together.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Neither Germany nor Italy have doubts. Our crisis is not a material crisis. We have lost faith in our destiny... We are like mariners without a pilot.

Philippe Pétain

Citizens, by what illusion could one persuade himself that you are inhuman. Your Revolutionary Tribunal has condemned three hundred rascals to death in a year. Has not the Spanish Inquisition done worse than that... Have the English assizes butchered no one in that period?... What of the kings of Europe, does anyone prate to them of pity? Ah, do not allow yourselves to grow soft-hearted!

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just

I would rather have a Scot come from Scotland to govern the people of this kingdom well and justly than that you should govern them ill in the sight of all the world.

Louis IX of France

My age is that of the bon Sansculotte Jésus; an age fatal to Revolutionists.

Reply given at his trial

Camille Desmoulins

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

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

Marcellin Berthelot

Tilling and grazing are the two breasts that feed France.

Maximilien de Béthune

When it's a question of peace one must talk to the Devil himself.

Édouard Herriot

No government can remain stable in an unstable society and an unstable World.

There is in gardens a plant which one ought to leave dry, although most people water it. It is the weed called envy.

Cosimo de' Medici

Our epoch has been called the century of work. It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.

On Nice terrorist attacks:

France must live with terrorism, but we will not give in.

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

Jean-Baptiste Colbert

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

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

Antoine-Vincent Arnault

Life here is hellish for a woman in politics unless she is elderly and ugly.

Remember that there is not one of you who does not carry in his cartridge-pouch the marshal's baton of the duke of Reggio; it is up to you to bring it forth.

It is appropriate here to recall that the so-called Dark Ages began with the flight of the individuals into the protection of lords or chapters and came to an end when the individual again found it to his advantage to set forth on his own. We live at a time when everything conspires to push the individual into the fold.

Bertrand de Jouvenel