French Government Quotes & Sayings

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 We saw the British as an outdated Imperial force, organised by freemasons, who sought to turn the clock back one hundred years to the days when their word was the law around the world.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

Maggie threw her head back and laughed. 'So you're going to try ... what? Birds of a Feather?' she quested.
'Of course not,' Kat said. 'Everyone knows the French government banned the importation of peacocks in 1987. — Ally Carter

From that point on, the extraordinary system of spies and informers which has played an important part in the political work of the French state into our own time took shape. (Sartine, who became lieutenant general de police in 1759, is supposed to have said to Louis XV, "Sire, when three people are chatting in the street one of them is surely my man.") Eighteenth-century police manuals like those of Colquhoun in England or Lemaire in France are no less than general treatises on the government's full repertoire of domestic regulation, coercion, and surveillance. — Charles Tilly

In other words, every cent the French government spent on guns for the Americans was another centime it would not have to spend on butter for the starving peasants who would one day storm Versailles. — Sarah Vowell

Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers's Centre Georges Pompidou of 1971-1977 - the true prototype of the modern museum as popular architectural spectacle - wound up costing so much more than planned that the French government solved the shortfall by cutting support for several regional museums. — Martin Filler

What is fatah? We can easily see and resist the effects of jihad in militant terrorism, but we have trouble seeing and resisting the more subtle strategy that the Muslims call fatah. Fatah is infiltration, moving into a country in numbers large enough to affect the culture. It means taking advantage of tolerant laws and accommodative policies to insert the influence of Islam. In places where a military invasion will not succeed, the slow, systematic, and unrelenting methods of fatah are conquering whole nations. An illustration is: A demographic revolution is taking place today in France. Some experts are projecting that by the year 2040, 80 percent of the population of France will be Muslim. At that point the Muslim majority will control commerce, industry, education, and religion. They will also control the government, as well, and occupy all the key positions in the French Parliament. And a Muslim will be president.19 — David Jeremiah

I rejoice that liberty ... now finds an asylum in the bosom of a regularly organized government; a government, which, being formed to secure happiness of the French people, corresponds with the ardent wishes of my heart, while it gratifies the pride of every citizen of the United States, by its resemblance to their own. — George Washington

The French Foreign Office, wishful to allay the anger of the Parisian mob clamouring for war with England, secured this admirable couple and sent them round the town. You cannot be amused at a thing, and at the same time want to kill it. The French nation saw the English citizen and citizeness - no caricature, but the living reality - and their indignation exploded in laughter. The success of the stratagem prompted them later on to offer their services to the German Government, with the beneficial results that we all know. — Jerome K. Jerome

But after taking command of the Army of Italy in 1796, Napoleon took organized theft to a new level ... The French also stole art at a new level: Napoleon requested that the government send him experts qualified to judge which paintings his men should steal; priceless canvases by Titian, Raphael, Rubens, and Leonardo da Vinci were shipped to Paris. — Tom Reiss

I'm going to Iowa for an award. Then I'm appearing at Carnegie Hall, it's sold out. Then I'm sailing to France to be honored by the French government - I'd give it all up for one erection. — Groucho Marx

Political convictions then were of the utmost importance, so intensely felt that it was difficult even for well-balanced and temperate men to think of the opposition party without bitterness. To the rank and file of the Federalists, the Democrats seemed a vulgar, ignorant mob at best, at worst a group of "knaves and blockheads." To the Democrats, the Federalists appeared abandoned traitors fawning at the feet of the British government, a blindly selfish aristocracy who deserved little better treatment than the French nobility had received a few years before during the Reign of Terror. — William Edward Buckley

I didn't want to argue with my hosts. I wanted them to talk. But I felt like reminding Li that perhaps forty million Chinese people had died of starvation a half century earlier because they followed their government's orders. It was the largest famine in history. A snapshot taken then would have given a very different picture of the supposedly essential character of Chinese people, and it would have entirely missed the point. Governments matter. Markets matter. History matters. International circumstances matter. — Howard W. French

He nurse the illusion that he is one of the lost arms of the Venus de Milo, and hopes that the French Government may be persuaded to buy him. — Saki

I have nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakians, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. This is a natural inclination. [..] Government should not break up a neighborhood on a numerical basis. As soon as the Government does, the white folks flee. — Jimmy Carter

There is only one universal language, which is the language of numbers and proportions that are so striking and stunningly built into the Great Pyramid and to which our current science has no appropriate response. We can no longer ignore that this ancient civilization was aware of our units used in modern mathematics and physics and were even aware of our metric system. Our metric system originating in the eighteenth century, designed and implemented by a committee of mathematicians and physicists commissioned by the French revolutionary government. — Willem Witteveen

Canada could have enjoyed: English government, French culture, and American know-how. Instead it ended up with: English know-how, French government, and American culture. — John Robert Colombo

From the days of Spartacus, Weishophf, Karl Marx, Trotski, Belacoon, Rosa Luxenburg, and Ema Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th Century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. — Winston Churchill

The presumption took hold and grew ever firmer that it was the business of government to find solutions to all such problems. Any minister who sought to say that there was nothing that he could or should try to do about them was at once forced on to his defensive back foot by media and parliamentary pressure. At the same time, more citizens were ready to complain about the shortcomings of existing services, and more numerous and competent pressure groups, like the claimants' unions I had come across in supplementary benefits, arose to pursue their complaints. To cap it all, the courts began, and went on to widen, the practice of subjecting the administrative decisions of ministers to judicial review. No wonder that the ministers themselves, also wilting (as their American and French counterparts were not) under the pressures of increasing parliamentary business, found themselves in difficulties. — Richard Wilding

The government is shutting down the coal industry, they say it's cheaper to draw nuclear power off the French grid and cheaper to buy coal from Colombia. — Martin Cruz Smith

America posed a deeply interesting question to any Frenchmen with a political curiosity to ask it. How had Americans launched a revolution that aimed at establishing a free, stable, and constitutional government and made a success of it, while the French had in forty-one years lurched from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy, to the declaration of the republic, to mob rule, the Terror, the mass murder, and thence to a conservative republic, Napoleonic autocracy, the Bourbon restoration, further revolution, and the installation of an Orleanist constitutional monarchy? — Alan Ryan

Senegal had always boasted one of Africa's most vibrant merchant cultures. The country's boubou-wearing traders had long colonized street corners in New York and many a European city, where they sold clothing, gadgetry, and assorted tourist fare. But in 2004, Dakar's traders woke up suddenly to the alarming notion that they were in turn being colonized by Chinese who seemed to be taking over the retail sector. Large protests followed in Dakar, with the striking Senegalese traders demanding government action to protect them from the Chinese newcomers. From — Howard W. French

Well, he worked for a fairly harmless agency. He worked for the agency that looked after French prisoners of war. Though he was capable of some horrendous blunders when he was president. He once said that the Vichy legislation against Jews affected only foreign Jews, which was, of course, absolutely wrong. So he obviously wasn't too well-informed about what is going on in the Vichy government. — Robert O. Paxton

My belief is, from all that I have seen of the French people and their Government, that they are much more likely to presume upon our weakness than to take offence at our strength. — Robert Peel

Darks drifts covered the horizon. A strange shadow approaching nearer and nearer, was spreading little by little over men, over things, over ideas; a shadow which came from indignations and from systems. All that had been hurriedly stifled was stirring and fermenting. Sometimes the conscious of the honest man caught its breath, there was so much confusion in that air in which sophisms were mingled with truths. Minds trembled in the social anxiety like leaves at the approach of the storm. The electric tension was so great that at certain moments any chance-comer, thought unknown, flashed out. Then the twilight darkness fell again. At intervals, deep and sullen mutterings enabled men to judge of the amount of lightning in the cloud. — Victor Hugo

Whole villages of Muslims had been hacked to pieces by drunken Christian youth, and as foreigners, we should have been pulled out by the organization. But the U.S. government supported the Christian tribes, just as the French had all through the colonial days, and to pull us out would have meant admitting that things weren't as stable for their puppet government as the western companies, trading in Ivory Coast for cocoa, rubber, and timber, and selling Coke and cigarettes, wanted to hear. — Tony D'Souza

Czechoslovak government and the pro-Nazi leaders of the country's Sudeten German minority, Hitler demanded that the German population be given "self-determination," that is, autonomy within the Czechoslovak republic. The British and French governments feared that these demands, following close on the German annexation of Austria, would be a first step in Hitler's eventual dismembering of Czechoslovakia and its absorption into a greater Reich. — Debi Unger

Ironically, Alfred Binet, one of the creators of the IQ test, intended the test to serve precisely the opposite function. In fact, he originally designed it (on commission from the French government) exclusively to identify children with special needs so they could get appropriate forms of schooling. He never intended it to identify degrees of intelligence or "mental worth." In fact, Binet noted that the scale he created "does not permit the measure of intelligence, because intellectual qualities are not superposable, and therefore cannot be measured as linear surfaces are measured." Nor did he ever intend it to suggest that a person could not become more intelligent over time. "Some recent thinkers," he said, "[have affirmed] that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we must try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing. — Ken Robinson

After being rationed to a single ball, a whole box of them gave me a delightful feeling of sudden wealth. French politicians must have a similar sensation when elected to high office and permitted to dip into the chateaux and limousines and government-issue caviar. No wonder they cling to power long after they should be tucked away in an old folks' home. I'd do the same. — Peter Mayle

French sought reforms before liberties ... They hate, not certain specific privileges, but all distinctions of classes; they would insist upon equality of rights in the midst of slavery. They respect neither contracts nor private rights; indeed, they hardly recognize individual rights at all in their absorbing devotion to the public good ... They conceived all the social and administrative reforms effected by the Revolution before the idea of free institutions had once flashed upon their mind ... Most of them were strongly opposed to deliberative assemblies, to local and subordinate authorities, and to the various checks which have been established from time to time in free countries to counterbalance the supreme government ... French nation is prepared to tolerate in a government, that favors and flatters its desire for equality, practices and principles that are, in fact, the tools of despotism. — Alexis De Tocqueville

I shall not remind you, Citizen-Directors, of all I have done for the triumph of liberty, the prosperity of St. Domingo, the glory of the French Republic; nor will I protest to you my attachment to our mother country, to my duties; my respect to the constitution, to the laws of the Republic, and my submission to the government. — Toussaint Louverture

Having wallowed in a delightful orgy of anti-French sentiment, having deplored and applauded the villains themselves, having relished the foibles of bankers, railwaymen, diplomats, and police, the public was now ready to see its faith restored in the basic soundness of banks, railroads, government, and police. — Michael Crichton

When, in May, tensions reached a high point, London warned Berlin that if it attacked Czechoslovakia and the French were embroiled as well, "His Majesty's Government could not guarantee that they would not be forced by circumstances to become involved also". Ar the same time, English officials were telling their counterparts in Paris that they were "not disinterested" in Czechoslovakia's fate. I learned in the course of my own career that British diplomats are trained to write in with precision; so when a double negative is employed, the intent, usually, is not to clarify an issue but to surround it with fog. — Madeleine K. Albright

For more than a decade, the United States had been giving large-scale military aid to the French colonialists, and then to the American-installed but authoritarian South Vietnamese government, to fight nationalists and communists in Vietnam. More than 23,000 U.S. military advisers were there by the end of 1964, occasionally engaging in combat. On the other side of the world, the American public knew and cared little about the guerrilla war. In fact, few knew exactly where Vietnam was. Nevertheless, people were willing to go along when their leaders told them that action was essential to resist communist aggression. — Edward S. Greenberg

Incidentally, Modi also attracted immense interest from overseas groups led by industrialists as big as French-Iranian billionaire Pierre Morad Omidyar, who founded eBay. He is rumoured to have funded Modi's elections. Jayant Sinha, a former Omidyar Network partner, is now a junior minister in the Modi government. — Ullekh NP

He had spent the last five years, he [JFK] said ruefully, running for office, and he did not know any real public officials, people to run a government, serious men. The only ones he knew, he admitted, were politicians, and if this seemed a denigration of his own kind, it was not altogether displeasing to the older man. Politicians did need men to serve, to run the government. The implication was obvious. Politicians could run Pennsylvania and Ohio, and if they could not run Chicago they could at least deliver it. But politicians run the world? What did they know about the Germans, the French, the Chinese? He needed experts for that — David Halberstam

Charles's old ally Don Enrique, King of Castile, also died before taking sides, and his son, Juan I, though heavily pressed by Charles V to support Clement, preferred to maintain "neutrality," saying that, while faithful to the French alliance, he could not go against the conscience of his subjects. Common people, nobility, clerics, learned men, he wrote, were all Urbanist. "What government, O wise prince," he pointedly inquired of Charles, "has ever succeeded in triumphing over public conscience supported by reason? What punishments are available to subjugate a free soul? — Barbara W. Tuchman

It is rarely remembered now that socialism in its beginnings was frankly authoritarian. It began quite openly as a reaction against the liberalism of the French Revolution. The French writers who laid its foundation had no doubt that their ideas could be put into practice only by a strong dictatorial government. The first of modern planners, Saint-Simon, predicted that those who did not obey his proposed planning boards would be 'treated as cattle'. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

You tell me that class distinctions are baubles used by monarchs, I defy you to show me a republic, ancient or modern, in which distinctions have not existed. You call these medals and ribbons baubles; well, it is with such baubles that men are led. I would not say this in public, but in a assembly of wise statesmen it should be said. I don't think that the French love liberty and equality: the French are not changed by ten years of revolution: they are what the Gauls were, fierce and fickle. They have one feeling: honour. We must nourish that feeling. The people clamour for distinction. See how the crowd is awed by the medals and orders worn by foreign diplomats. We must recreate these distinctions. There has been too much tearing down; we must rebuild. A government exists, yes and power, but the nation itself - what is it? Scattered grains of sand. — Napoleon Bonaparte

European nation with highest politician/lover ratio: Few European states can hope to compete with France and Italy in this department, and the two nations have been battling for European political lothario supremacy for over thirty years. The contest has been increasingly acrimonious since 1998, when France was initially the clear winner but somehow "lost" sixty-eight illicit lovers in the recount and had to concede defeat. The following year was no less rocked in scandal, when the Italians were disqualified for "stretching the boundaries" of their elected representatives to include senior civil servants - and the crown was tossed back to France. No one was quite prepared for the disgraceful scandal the following year when it was discovered that one French minister had no mistress at all and "loved his wife," a shocking revelation that led to his resignation and ultimately to the fall of the government. — Jasper Fforde

In the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty's Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power. They have given the Polish Government an assurance to this effect. I may add that the French Government have authorized me to make it plain that they stand in the same position in this matter. — Neville Chamberlain

It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939 ... from the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat. — Maurice Cowling

I do love this people [the French] with all my heart, and think that with a better religion and a better form of government and their present governors their condition and country would be most enviable. — Thomas Jefferson

Of course, figuring out what actually works in reducing childhood obesity is not really the point of these programs. (If it were, then the government might finally stop categorizing french fries as "vegetables.") The real point is the same thing it always is: conformity, control, and eventually fundamental transformation. — Glenn Beck

It is a proof of the divergence of the tendencies of the socialist and the bourgeois pictures of history - and from now on there will be two distinct historical cultures running side by side without ever really fusing - that people who have been brought up on the conventional version of history and know all about the Robespierrist Terror during the Great French Revolution, should find it an unfamiliar fact that the Terror of the government of Thiers executed, imprisoned or exiled more people - the number has been estimated at a hundred thousand - in that one week of the suppression of the [Paris] Commune [of 1871] than the revolutionary Terror of Robespierre had done in three years. — Edmund Wilson

What would the new teacher, representing France, teach us? Railroading? No. France knows nothing valuable about railroading. Steamshipping? No. France has no superiorities over us in that matter. Steamboating? No. French steamboating is still of Fulton's date
1809. Postal service? No. France is a back number there. Telegraphy? No, we taught her that ourselves. Journalism? No. Magazining? No, that is our own specialty. Government? No; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Nobility, Democracy, Adultery the system is too variegated for our climate. Religion? No, not variegated enough for our climate. Morals? No, we cannot rob the poor to enrich ourselves. — Mark Twain

Turgot turned out to be correct regarding this chilling prophecy: "War we ought to shun as the greatest of evils, since it will render impossible for a very long time, and perhaps forever, the reform which is absolutely necessary for the prosperity of the State and for the relief of the people." In other words, every cent the French government spent on guns for the Americans was another centime it would not have to spend on butter for the starving peasants who would one day storm Versailles. The — Sarah Vowell

In fact, after having abolished the monarchy, the best of all governments, [the French Revolution] had transferred all the public power to the people - the people ... ever easy to deceive and to lead into every excess — Pope Pius VI

The funny thing in France is that writers are not allowed to retire, because the French government say you are still earning money from books you wrote 20 years ago. — Peter Mayle

At the top of the Queen's Staircase at the Tuileries, there is a series of communicating chambers, crowded every day with clerks, secretaries, messengers, with army officers and purveyors, officials of the Commune and officers of the courts: with government couriers, booted and spurred, waiting for dispatches from the last room in the suite. Look down: outside there are cannon and files of soldiers. The room at the end was once the private office of Louis the Last. You cannot go in.
That room is now the office of the Committee of Public Safety. The Committee exists to supervise the Council of Ministers and to expedite its decisions. — Hilary Mantel

Of course Americans celebrate Independence Day as opposed to Yorktown Day. Who wants to barbecue a hot dog and ponder how we owe our independence to the French navy? Who wants to twirl sparklers and dwell on how the French government's expenditures in America contributed to the bankruptcy that sparked the French Revolution that would send Rochambeau to prison, Lafayette into exile (then prison), and our benefactor His Most Christian Majesty Louis XVI to the guillotine. — Sarah Vowell

When the French Revolution broke out, it certainly afforded to Mr. Burke an opportunity of doing some good, had he been disposed to it; instead of which, no sooner did he see the old prejudices wearing away, than he immediately began sowing the seeds of a new inveteracy, as if he were afraid that England and France would cease to be enemies. That there are men in all countries who get their living by war, and by keeping up the quarrels of Nations, is as shocking as it is true; but when those who are concerned in the government of a country, make it their study to sow discord and cultivate prejudices between Nations, it becomes the more unpardonable. — Thomas Paine

Two weeks after the flight of the government from Naples, the French moved an army of six thousand soldiers into the city, and by late January a cabal of enlightened aristocrats and professors had engendered a monstrosity that called itself the Parthenopean or Vesuvian Republic. Most — Susan Sontag

I was ecstatic they re-named 'French Fries' as 'Freedom Fries'. Grown men and women in positions of power in the U.S. government showing themselves as idiots. — Johnny Depp

What can a mere French minister do when associated with Lloyd George, who thinks he is Napoleon, and Woodrow Wilson, who thinks he is Jesus Christ? — Georges Clemenceau

Thus, seeking to produce a typology of forms of the art of government, La Mothe Le Vayer, in a text from the following century (consisting of educational writings intended for the French Dauphin), says that there are three fundamental types of government, each of which relates to a particular science or discipline: the art of self-government, connected with morality; the art of properly governing a family, which belongs to economy; and finally the science of ruling the state, which concerns politics. What matters, notwithstanding this typology, is that the art of government is always characterized by the essential continuity of one type with the other, and of second type with the third. — Michel Foucault

One of the greatest things I've ever seen happen was the morning I opened the newspaper and it said that some very powerful government officials had decided to change the name of "french fries" to "freedoom fries" and "french toast" to "freedom toast". It was impressive. I wanted to write a letter to them just to thank them, just for proving globally that they were absolute imbeciles. — Johnny Depp