Quotes & Sayings About De Gaulle

Hercules King of Rome and of Annemark, three times one surnamed de Gaulle will lead, Italy and the one of St. Mark to tremble, first monarch, renowned above all. — Nostradamus

Nobody can easily bring together a nation that has 265 kinds of cheese' (Charles de Gaulle, 1961 speech) — Mark Kurlansky

You'll live. Only the best get killed. — Charles De Gaulle

It is overlooked, perhaps forgotten, by almost everyone today that we were there to defend Europe against the multiple threats represented by the Allies. We saw the British as an outdated Imperial force, organised by freemasons, who sought to turn the clock back one hundred years to the days when their word was the law around the world. Why should they be entitled to install their freemason puppet, De Gaulle, in France, to rule as a proxy? The Vichy government had three consistent points in its propaganda regarding the threats to the French people: these were De Gaulle, freemasonry and communism. As for the American state, we perceived that as controlled by the forces of international finance and banking, who wished to abolish national governments and have the world run by banks and corporations. — Holger Eckhertz

Chapter One The weather in Paris was unusually warm as Peter Haskell's plane landed at Charles de Gaulle Airport. The plane taxied neatly to the gate, and a few minutes later, briefcase in hand, Peter was striding through the airport. He was almost smiling as he got on the customs line, despite the heat of the day and the number of people crowding ahead of him in line. Peter Haskell loved Paris. He generally traveled to Europe — Danielle Steel

It's better to have a bad plan then no plan at all. — Charles De Gaulle

For glory gives herself only to those who have always dreamed of her. — Charles De Gaulle

We may go to the moon, but that' s not very far. The greatest distance we have to cover still lies within us. — Charles De Gaulle

China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese. — Charles De Gaulle

To govern is always to choose among disadvantages. — Charles De Gaulle

These people really aim very badly. — Charles De Gaulle

One cannot govern with 'buts'. — Charles De Gaulle

War stirs in men's hearts the mud of their worst instincts. It puts a premium on violence, nourishes hatred, and gives free rein to cupidity. It crushes the weak, exalts the unworthy, and bolsters tyranny ..Time and time again it has destroyed all ordered living, devastated hope, and put the prophets to death. — Charles De Gaulle

I am a man who belongs to nobody and who belongs to everybody. — Charles De Gaulle

Belgium is a country invented by the British to annoy the French. — Charles De Gaulle

When I want to know what France thinks, I ask myself. — Charles De Gaulle

Adversity attracts the man of character. He seeks out the bitter joy of responsibility. — Charles De Gaulle

You start out giving your hat, then you give your coat, then your shirt, then your skin and finally your soul. — Charles De Gaulle

Long live free Quebec! — Charles De Gaulle

Politics, when it is an art and a service, not an exploitation, is about acting for an ideal through realities. — Charles De Gaulle

In war, the policy of least exertion always risks being paid for dearly. — Charles De Gaulle

How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese? — Charles De Gaulle

And who is the hero of that story? Who slew the dragon [totalitarianism]? Yes, it was the ordinary man, the taxpayer, the grunt who fought and won the wars. Yes, it was America and its allies. Yes, it was the great leaders: FDR, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Truman, John Paul II, Thatcher, Reagan. But above all, victory required one man without whom the fight would have been lost at the beginning. It required Winston Churchill. — Charles Krauthammer

The great leaders have always stage-managed their effects. — Charles De Gaulle

Only by coming to grips with difficulty can you realize your full potential. — Charles De Gaulle

Deliberation is a function of the many; action is the function of one. — Charles De Gaulle

Character is the virtue of hard times. — Charles De Gaulle

How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese? — Charles De Gaulle

Why do you think that at 67 I would start a career as a dictator ? — Charles De Gaulle

There can be no other criterion, no other standard than gold. Yes, gold which never changes, which can be shaped into ingots, bars, coins, which has no nationality and which is eternally and universally accepted as the unalterable fiduciary value par excellence. — Charles De Gaulle

I was the little French boy who grew up hearing people talk of De Gaulle and the Resistance. France against the Nazis! Then when that boy grew up, he began to uncover things. We began to legitimately ask the question, 'What exactly did our parents do during the Occupation?' We discovered it was not the story they were telling us. — Jacques Audiard

I have against me the bourgeois, the military and the diplomats, and for me, only the people who take the Metro. — Charles De Gaulle

It so happens that the world is undergoing a transformation to which no change that has yet occurred can be compared, either in scope or in rapidity. — Charles De Gaulle

I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless quagmire, however much you spend in men and money. (On Vietnam War) — Charles De Gaulle

A true leader always keeps an element of surprise up his sleeve, which others cannot grasp but which keeps his public excited and breathless. — Charles De Gaulle

Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished. Tomorrow, as today, I will speak on Radio London. — Charles De Gaulle

France cannot be France without greatness. — Charles De Gaulle

Yes, it is Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, it is Europe, it is the whole of Europe, that will decide the fate of the world. — Charles De Gaulle

One can unite the French only under the threat of danger. One cannot simply bring together a nation that produces 265 kinds of cheese. — Charles De Gaulle

No policy is worth anything outside of reality. — Charles De Gaulle

I always thought I was Jeanne d'Arc and Bonaparte. How little one knows oneself. — Charles De Gaulle

What do you take me for, an idiot? — Charles De Gaulle

Only peril can bring the French together. One can't impose unity out of the blue on a country that has 265 different kinds of cheese. — Charles De Gaulle

France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war — Charles De Gaulle

I myself have become a Gaullist only little by little. — Charles De Gaulle

France was built with swords. The fleur-de-lis, symbol of national unity, is only the image of a spear with three pikes. — Charles De Gaulle

Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself. He imposes his own stamp of action, takes responsibility for it, makes it his own. — Charles De Gaulle

The future does not belong to men ... — Charles De Gaulle

No, I'm not talking about the Russians; I mean the Germans. In spite of everything, to have pushed so far! — Charles De Gaulle

No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent. — Charles De Gaulle

The presidency is temporary - but the family is permanent. — Yvonne De Gaulle

[Charles de Gaulle] has been abysmally careless, like a man running a bus over mountains, who forgot to equip it with good brakes. — Janet Flanner

Diplomats are useful only in fair weather. As soon as it rains they drown in every drop. — Charles De Gaulle

The cemetery is filled with indispensable men. — Charles De Gaulle

The more I get to know men, the more I love dogs. — Charles De Gaulle

Ask him about the cemeteries, Dean!"
In 1966 upon being told that President Charles DeGaulle had taken France out of NATO and that all U.S. troops must be evacuated off of French soil President Lyndon Johnson mentioned to Secretary of State Dean Rusk that he should ask DeGaulle about the Americans buried in France. Dean implied in his answer that that DeGaulle should not really be asked that in the meeting at which point President Johnson then told Secretary of State Dean Rusk:
"Ask him about the cemeteries Dean!"
That made it into a Presidential Order so he had to ask President DeGaulle.
So at end of the meeting Dean did ask DeGaulle if his order to remove all U.S. troops from French soil also included the 60,000+ soldiers buried in France from World War I and World War II.
DeGaulle, embarrassed, got up and left and never answered. — Lyndon B. Johnson

The Jews remain what they have been at all times: an elite people, self-confident and domineering. — Charles De Gaulle

I wholeheartedly welcomed Charles de Gaulle eulogy of French valour, to which he attributed the liberation of Paris. — Coco Chanel

I feel not a person but an instrument of destiny. — Charles De Gaulle

What I do see, for instance, is that the French are not very happy with the ... I am happy but they are not and I understand why they are not happy. They still believe in some nuclear strategic formulas which they have inherited from General De Gaulle and they have started the process of rethinking, they haven't gone very far. — Helmut Schmidt

We are not here to laugh. — Charles De Gaulle

A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities. — Charles De Gaulle

Greatness is a road leading towards the unknown. — Charles De Gaulle

Silence is the ultimate weapon of power. — Charles De Gaulle

My dear and old country, here we are once again together faced with a heavy trial. — Charles De Gaulle

One does not arrest Voltaire. — Charles De Gaulle

For get this quite clear, every time we have to decide between Europe and the open sea, it is always the open sea we shall choose. Every time I have to decide between you [Charles de Gaulle] and Roosevelt, I shall always choose Roosevelt. — Winston S. Churchill

I grew up to always respect authority and respect those in charge. — Charles De Gaulle

The sword is the axis of the world and grandeur cannot be divided. — Charles De Gaulle

The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs. — Charles De Gaulle

She was beautiful and lithe, with soft skin the color of bread and eyes like green almonds, and she had straight black hair that reached to her shoulders, and an aura of antiquity that could just as well have been Indonesian as Andean. She was dressed with subtle taste: a lynx jacket, a raw silk blouse with very delicate flowers, natural linen trousers, and shoes with a narrow stripe the color of bougainvillea. 'This is the most beautiful woman I've ever seen,' I thought, when I saw her pass by with the stealthy stride of a lioness, while I waited in the check-in line at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for the plane to New York. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It is better to have a bad method than to have none. — Charles De Gaulle

France has no friends, only interests. — Charles De Gaulle

I always say if you're going to do a movie about Charles de Gaulle get a Frenchman, you know. I'm not French. And yeah, sure I could get with a dialect coach and work for six months trying to talk like a Frenchman. But there's some French actors. Just get one of them, you know. — Billy Bob Thornton

I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French. — Charles De Gaulle

Recalled Sir Edward Spears, the wartime liaison between Churchill and de Gaulle. We had 15,000 French sailors at Liverpool. I went to speak to them. I tried to persuade them to continue the fighting. Impossible ... — Charles Kaiser

In the tumult of great events, solitude was what I hoped for. Now it is what I love. How is it possible to be contented with anything else when one has come face to face with history? — Charles De Gaulle

Gen. de Gaulle is only concerned about history, and no jury can dictate the judgment of history. Georges Pompidou — Mark Kurlansky

Men can have friends, statesmen cannot. — Charles De Gaulle

For all of us Frenchmen, the guiding rule of our epoch is to be faithful to France. — Charles De Gaulle

Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life. — Charles De Gaulle

France had a policy, initiated by General de Gaulle, of trying to turn Europe into what was then called a 'third force,' independent of the two superpowers, so Europe should pursue an independent course. — Noam Chomsky

In order to be the master, the politician poses as the servant. — Charles De Gaulle

The desire of privilege and the taste of equality are the dominant and contradictory passions of the French of all times. — Charles De Gaulle

You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless. — Charles De Gaulle

General de Gaulle was a thoroughly bad boy. The day he arrived, he thought he was Joan of Arc and the following day he insisted that he was Georges Clemenceau. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

The leader is always alone before bad fates. — Charles De Gaulle

Men are of no importance. What counts is who commands. — Charles De Gaulle

Always choose the hardest way, on it you will not find opponents — Charles De Gaulle

Every Frenchman wants to enjoy one or more privileges; that's the way he shows his passion for equality — Charles De Gaulle

I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians. — Charles De Gaulle

Now we are intimately locked together. You get swine flu in Mexico; it's a problem for Charles de Gaulle Airport 24 hours later. Lehman Brothers goes down; the whole lot collapses. There are fires in the steppes of Russia; food riots in Africa. — Paddy Ashdown

My favourite novel is Frederick Forsythe's Day Of The Jackal, the story about the unproven case of this apparent Englishman who was hired to assassinate De Gaulle.... — Charles Kennedy

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him. — Charles De Gaulle

There can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt. — Charles De Gaulle

Nothing lasts until it is incessantly renewed — Charles De Gaulle

It's impossible in normal times to rally a nation that has 265 kinds of cheese. — Charles De Gaulle

The sergeants are shunted forward and they blink and stare up at Gonzo as he leans on the edge of his giant mixing bowl. MacArthur never addressed his troops from a mixing bowl
not even one made from a spare geodesic radio emplacement shell
and certainly de Gaulle never did. But Gonzo Lubitsch does, and he does it as if a whole long line of commanders were standing at his shoulder, urging him on.
"Gentlemen," says Gonzo softly, "holidays are over. I need an oven, and I need one in about twenty minutes, or these fine flapjacks will go to waste, and that is not happening."
And something about this statement and the voice in which he says it makes it clear that this is simply true. One way or another, this thing will get done. Under a layer of grime and horror, these two are soldiers, and more, they are productive, can-do sorts of people. Rustily but with a gratitude which is not so far short of worship, they say "Yes, sir" and are about their business. — Nick Harkaway

One must speak little. In action one must say nothing. The chief is the one who does not speak. — Charles De Gaulle

When France fell in 1940, De Gaulle was a temporary brigadier general. — John Eisenhower