Quotes & Sayings About French Resistance

In Paris, I found myself surrounded by Germans; they were all over the place. They played music, and people would go and listen to them! All along rue de Rivoli, as far as you could see from place de la Concorde, there were enormous swastika banners five or six floors high. I just thought, This is impossible.
Imagine that someone comes into your home - someone you don't like - he settles down, gives orders: "Here we are, we're at home now; you must obey." To me that was unbearable. — Pearl Witherington Cornioley

I don't believe in journalists having 'responsibility.' — Seth Lipsky

It's a French technique. Soups get screened, and sauces. Forced through a tamis or a chinois. Everything that comes out is smooth and all the rough parts get left behind, thrown away. I don't want to be screened. — Jael McHenry

In my day, MI6 - which I called the Circus in the books - stank of wartime nostalgia. People were defined by secret cachet: one man did something absolutely extraordinary in Norway; another was the darling of the French Resistance. We didn't even show passes to go in and out of the building. — John Le Carre

Writing a novel about World War II and the French Resistance was a challenge both sobering and thrilling. — Bobbie Ann Mason

Where a new invention promises to be useful, it ought to be tried. — Thomas Jefferson

The whole military structure in Haiti that existed until the early 1990s was put in place by the American occupation. At the top there were Southern white officers, who led an army that crushed the indigenous resistance - the cacos. A high-ranking U.S. officer said when he arrived, "To think these niggers speak French!" Later, Haitian officers attended the notorious School of the Americas at Fort Benning. The threat from the U.S. is something that is always hanging over people's heads: If we don't behave, we'll have occupation again. — Edwidge Danticat

And yet I think of Christopher Reeve who said he would pay two million dollars to be able to feel pain again. What a courageous man! So I have to think that pain is a blessing. — Ricardo Montalban

The Vietnamese see their history as an unending series of struggles of resistance to aggression, by the Chinese, the Mongols, the Japanese, the French, and now the Americans. — Noam Chomsky

My father-in-law was a pilot. During World War II, he was shot down in a B-17 over Belgium. With the help of the French Resistance, he made his way through Occupied France and back to his base in England. — Bobbie Ann Mason

Today one might be tempted to say that patriotism is the last refuge of the tribal religion dedicated to the worship of German, French, English and Russian Gods of Battles. Surely such a religion has nothing in common with the religion which counsels for the disciple non-resistance, unstinted forgiveness, and the elimination of all rancor? — Joseph Alexander Leighton

Mussolini is quite humiliated because our troops have not moved a step forward. Even today they have not succeeded in advancing and have halted in front of the first French fortification which put up some resistance. — Galeazzo Ciano

And I sometimes think that the fading out of the individual personality is what one should desire, not the status of a hero - a sort of effacement of oneself from history. The entire record of the human race has been falsified, it has been made up by bad governments to suit themselves, by kings and tyrants to make them look good. This idea of history as made by great men is quite nonsensical, when you look at it from the point of view of the people. The real heroes are those who have resisted tyrants, and it is in the nature of tyranny not only to kill those who oppose it but to wipe their names out of the record, to obliterate them, so that resistance seems impossible. — Hilary Mantel

After the occupation of Paris, Hitler visited Paris, which of course was a great jewel for him, and he wanted to go up on the Eiffel Tower and gaze down upon the city of Paris, which he'd conquered. For some reason the elevators mysteriously stopped working that day. Some people say it might have had to do with the French resistance. So he couldn't go up. — Joe Harris

Pearl Witherington: SOE Officer Whose Leadership of French Resistance Fighters Was a Thorn in the Side of the Germans — Kathryn J. Atwood

This was a different form of French resistance in Paris on this day, all of these people coming together and sending out pictures like this to the world about the world we still want this to be, instead of the one that terrorists want, and that means all terrorists, the world where we live in constant fear. — Kimberley Strassel

He will soon be claiming that the Resistance has liberated the world. — Coco Chanel

They are our brothers, these freedom fighters ... They are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance. We cannot turn away from them, for the struggle here is not right versus left; it is right versus wrong. — Ronald Reagan

I go over my own escape routes all the time. To survive in this state, you have to think like the French Resistance. — Tim Dorsey

General Wavell feared that the policy of strict blockade of Jibuti favoured by Generals de Gaulle and Le Gentilhomme would merely stiffen its resistance. He proposed instead making an offer to admit sufficient supplies, such as milk for children, to prevent distress, to allow any troops wishing to join the Free French to do so and to evacuate the rest to some other French colony, and to negotiate for the use of the railway for supplying his own forces. But at home we took a different view. — Winston S. Churchill

Parisians were not easy to engage in conversation. Perhaps that was why the Resistance had been so successful. — Sara Sheridan

I am a black stone, the size of a kitchen stove. They wash me in the stream every summer and sing over me. I am skulls and cocks, spring rain and the blood of the bull. Virgins lie with strangers in my name, the young priests throw pieces of themselves at my stone feet. I am white corn, and the wind in the corn, and the earth whereof the corn stands up, and the blind worms rolled in an oozy ball of love at the corn's roots. I am rut and flood and honeybees. — Peter S. Beagle

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

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

I would say that working with Ridley Scott makes the process of directing much more terrifying. — Jon Spaihts

But further, Hobbesian individualism required that traditional independent social authorities be eliminated or suppressed. Benjamin Constant, who was a keen observer of the French Revolution, explained why: "The interests and memories which spring from local customs contain a germ of resistance which is so distasteful to authority that it hastens to uproot it. Authority finds private individuals easier game: its enormous weight can flatten them out effortlessly as if they were so much sand. — Donald W. Livingston

You know when you've found a part that you want to play. You know it because the part takes you over. It sits in the script waiting for you to play him. — Peter O'Toole

4. THE CRUMBLING WALL

(Hamburger, prepared medium well, with bacon and barbecue sauce. Courtesy of that place on Solano, where, it should be mentioned, they use much too much barbecue sauce, which anyone should know has the almost immediate effect of soaking the bun, the bun becoming like oatmeal, inedible, the burger ruined, all in a matter of minutes--so quick that even when the burger is picked up and patrons attempt to save the bun ('Separate them! Quick! Get the bun away from the sauce! Now scrape! Scrape!'), it's always too late, necessitating the keeping, at home, of a stash of replacement buns, which are then toasted, heavily, to provide maximum resistance to the sauce's degenerative effects. Served with potatoes of the French kind, and fruit, as above. — Dave Eggers

He appealed to the pride of those he would conquer but gave them no doubt as to the consequences of resistance. 'The French army loves and respects all peoples, especially the simple and virtuous inhabitants of the mountains,' read a proclamation to the Tyrolese that month. 'But should you ignore your own interests and take up arms, we shall be terrible as the fire from heaven. — Andrew Roberts

Change means the unknown. — Eleanor Roosevelt