Le Jean Quotes & Sayings

Algebra is generous; she often gives more than is asked of her. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

What's surprising is that the people who fought against torture here are the communists. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

The fact is, that for the Huichol, and for all those who refuse, who are in flight, words and things are precisely what language does not speak about. Language is a natural act which implies belonging. He who exists, speaks. He who does not speak, does not exist. He has no place in the world. The Huichol language is Huichol to the same degree as the Huichol earth, the Huichol sky, religion, tattooing, dress, the peyoteros' hat. It is not enough to pronounce the syllables of the Huichol language to be Huichol. That is obvious. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

High office, is like a pyramid; only two kinds of animals reach the summit - reptiles and eagles. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

France was an occupied country, a country that surrendered and was left without the right to choose. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

O my dear parishioners, let us endeavor to get to heaven! There we shall see God. How happy we shall feel! If the parish is converted we shall go there in procession with the parish priest at the head ... We must get to heaven! What a pity it would be if some of you were to find yourselves on the other side! — Jean-Marie Le Pen

Nights are long when it's cold and you're waiting for a train. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Jean-Marie Le Pen is a holocaust denier who was convicted and fined for dismissing Nazi concentration camps as a, quote, "Detail in History." But he kept running this anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, populist unapologetic xenophobic far right party in French politics. — Rachel Maddow

It is always a poor way of reading the hearts of others to try to conceal our own.
[Fr., C'est toujours un mauvais moyen de lire dans le coeur des autres que d'affecter de cacher le sien.] — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Art makes murder into the supreme image of Beauty and in doing so sets free the vengeful God. (referring to Jean Lorrain's LE VICE ERRANT)
— Jennifer Birkett

Just go on..and faith will soon return. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

I am worn out by the insults and vexations that this work brings down on us. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

You cannot speak on behalf of a nation when you have no mandate to do so. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

Six months after 9/11, Jean-Marie Le Pen was almost elected president of France. There were a number of leaders and a number of parties running in the French national elections that year in the spring of 2002. But it ended up being not just a shock across France, and not just a shock across Europe. But it ended up being almost a worldwide shock when in the spring of 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen came in second in those national elections. That put him in a two-man runoff for the presidency of France, spring of 2002. — Rachel Maddow

He who writes books that aim to convince is a comedian, too, just a comedian. What has he got to offer others, apart from chains, still more chains? Fiction never liberated anyone. No one ever brought anything back from voyages through dream worlds. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

All words are possible, then, all names. They rain down, all these words, they disintegrate into a powdery avalanche. Belched from the volcano's mouth, they spurt in to the sky, then fall again. In the quivering air, like gelatine, the sounds trace their bubble paths. Can you imagine that? — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Each time a drop of water forms under the spout of a tap, it means that one can wrench something away from the nameless mass. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

As is well known the principle of virtual velocities transforms all statics into a mathematical assignment, and by D'Alembert's principle for dynamics, the latter is again reduced to statics. Although it is is very much in order that in gradual training of science and in the instruction of the individual the easier precedes the more difficult, the simple precedes the more complicated, the special precedes the general, yet the min, once it has arrived at the higher standpoint, demands the reverse process whereby all statics appears only as a very special case of mechanics. — Carl Friedrich Gauss

The opposite of what is noised about concerning men and things is often the truth.
[Fr., Le contraire des bruits qui courent des affaires ou des personnes est souvent la verite.] — Jean De La Bruyere

To someone who could grasp the Universe from a unified standpoint the entire creation would appear as a unique truth and necessity. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

a couple of our buddies from Le Pavilion had opened restaurants in the Catskills around Shan-daken and Hunter Mountain and spoke highly of the area, so Jean-Claude and I, along with a few other friends, rented a place there to use as a weekend retreat. — Jacques Pepin

I have said, and I repeat, at the risk of appearing sacrilegious, that the gas chambers are a detail of the history of the Second World War ... If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what's called a detail. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

A blue-stocking is the scourge of her husband, children, friends, servants, and every one.
[Fr., Une femme bel-esprit est le fleau de son mari, de ses enfants, de ses amis, de ses valets, et tout le monde.] — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

human beings, cans of living preserves — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Every age, and especially our own, stands in need of a Diogenes; but the difficulty is in finding men who have the courage to be one, and men who have the patience to endure one. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

When Joan D' Arc was asked by her judges why as a Christian she did not love the British, she answered that she did love them, but she loved British in their country. In the same way, we do not hate the Turks, we love them, but in their country. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

Real lives have no end. Real books have no end. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

As for me, even though I have been accused of anti-Semitism countless times, no one has ever heard me make anti-Semitic statements or engage in anti-Semitic behavior. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

Push on and faith will catch up with you. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

Mathematics enjoys the greatest reputation as a diversion from sexuality. This had been the very advice to which Jean-Jacques Rousseau was obliged to listen from a lady who was dissatisfied with him: 'Lascia le donne e studia la matematica!' So too our fugitive threw himself with special eagerness into the mathematics and geometry which he was taught at school, till suddenly one day his powers of comprehension were paralysed in the face of some apparently innocent problems. It was possible to establish two of these problems; 'Two bodies come together, one with a speed of ... etc' and 'On a cylinder, the diameter of whose surface is m, describe a cone ... etc' Other people would certainly not have regarded these as very striking allusions to sexual events; but he felt that he had been betrayed by mathematics as well, and took flight from it too. — Sigmund Freud

In England it was enough that Newton was the greatest mathematican of his century; in France he would have been expected to be agreeable too. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

[M]ay not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words that have ever existed, anywhere, in any age. In contrast with the spoken word and its classifying function, the purpose of writing seems, rather, to be a quest for the egg, the seed, nothing more. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

It was as if there were no names here, as if there were no words. The desert cleansed everything in its wind, wiped everything away. The men had the freedom of the open spaces in their eyes, their skin was like metal. Sunlight blazed everywhere. The ochre, yellow, gray, white sand, the fine sand shifted, showing the direction of the wind. It covered all traces, all bones. It repelled light, drove away water, life, far from a center that no one could recognize. The men knew perfectly well that the desert wanted nothing to do with them: so they walked on without stopping, following the paths that other feet had already traveled in search of something else. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

A philosopher is a fool who torments himself while he is alive, to be talked of after he is dead. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

Marine Le Pen may want me dead, that's possible, but she must not count on my co-operation — Jean-Marie Le Pen

The result is that you are now experiencing what we experienced in the war in Algeria: The Israeli government says that it is a victim of terrorist activity, but this activity is less visible than the military strikes. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

The government would have preferred not to take a stand, but the constant presence of the Israeli-Arab conflict on our television screens made it an issue that could no longer be avoided. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

Most people don't know how to ask the right questions. Mondo knew how to ask questions, just at the right time, when you weren't expecting it. People paused for a few seconds, they stopped thinking about themselves and their own business, they thought, and their eyes seemed to blur, because they remembered asking those questions themselves, long ago. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

The more wit we have, the less satisfied we are with it. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

I had never felt like that before, as if there were a sort of curse, a merciless force in the light that shone on a world where life is borken and lost, where each new day takes something from the day that precedes it, where suffering is inmovable ... — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Profane eloquence is transfered from the bar, where Le Maitre, Pucelle, and Fourcroy formerly practised it, and where it has become obsolete, to the Pulpit, where it is out of place. — Jean De La Bruyere

Now I know that without mirrors we are different, we're not really the same ... Maybe they had noticed us looking worriedly at other people's faces, as if we wee trying to see in them what we had become — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

for the existentialists, what generated anxiety was not the godlessness of the world, per se, but rather the freedom to choose between God and godlessness. Though freedom is something we actively seek, the freedom to choose generates anxiety. "When I behold my possibilities," Kierkegaard wrote, "I experience that dread which is the dizziness of freedom, and my choice is made in fear and trembling." Many people try to flee anxiety by fleeing choice. This helps explain the perverse-seeming appeal of authoritarian societies - the certainties of a rigid, choiceless society can be very reassuring - and why times of upheaval so often produce extremist leaders and movements: Hitler in Weimar Germany, Father Coughlin in Depression-era America, or Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Vladimir Putin in Russia today. But running from anxiety, Kierkegaard believed, was a mistake because anxiety was a "school" that taught people to come to terms with the human condition. — Scott Stossel

They were the men and the women of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They appeared as in a dream, at the crest of a dune, as if they were born of the cloudless sky. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

The non-stop music wrapped a warm cocoon around her body. People's thoughts, rapid words flowed around her, without doing her any harm. She was part and parcel of the shop, a commodity like any other, an article in the first-floor department. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

The true system of the World has been recognized, developed and perfected ... Everything has been discussed and analysed, or at least mentioned. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

Geometry, which should only obey Physics, when united with it sometimes commands it. If it happens that the question which we wish to examine is too complicated for all the elements to be able to enter into the analytical comparison we wish to make, we separate the more inconvenient [elements], we substitute others for them, less troublesome but also less real, and we are surprised to arrive, notwithstanding a painful labour, only at a result contradicted by nature; as if after having disguised it, cut it short or altered it, a purely mechanical combination could give it back to us. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

There are only two kinds of certain knowledge: Awareness of our own existence and the truths of mathematics. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

The Vichy government was under occupation and carried out the orders of the German occupier. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

Music that paints nothing is only noise. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

After all, you're not exactly a nation like all the other nations. You are unique, if only because you are such an ancient people, and because of the way you are spread all over the world and your obvious success in many fields. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

In their purest form myths, not unlike tragedy, are perhaps the most important moment in the troubled history of Mexican civilization. The cement of dreams, the architecture of language, made of images and rhythms which respond to and harmonize with each other through time and space, their wisdom is not of that which can be measured on the scale of the everyday. They are concurrently religion, ritual, belief, phantasmagoria, and the primary affirmation of a human coherence, the coagulating strength of language against the anguish of death and the certainty of nothingness. Myths express life, despite the promise of destruction, of the weight of the inevitable. They are without any doubt the most durable monuments of men, in America as in the ancient world. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

When two drivers curse each other on the road, and one of them happens to be a Jew, you can't define that as anti-Semitism. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

I thought that to get to know a desert it was enough to have been there. I thought that to have seen the dogs dying along the Cholula road, or to have seen the eyes of the lepers at Chiengmai gave me the right to talk about it. To have seen! To have been there! Rubbish! The world is not a book, it proves nothing. The spaces one has crossed were dark corridors with closed doors. The faces of the women to whom one gave oneself up completely: did they speak for anyone but themselves? The cities of man are secret. One walks along their streets, one sees them shine under one's feet, but one is not there, one never enters them. The dusty fields inhabited by people who are hungry, who wait patiently, are paradises of luxury and nourishment; shining at a vast distance from intelligence, at a vast distance from reason. They are not to be subjugated. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

One magnitude is said to be the limit of another magnitude when the second may approach the first within any given magnitude, however small, though the second may never exceed the magnitude it approaches. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

There wasn't anti-Semitism in France. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

You don't mean to say that Hogan has turned into a woman? Why, yes, that's him all right, you can recognize him by the fact that he has two legs, two arms, and an indecipherable face. Man, woman, what difference does it make? Are they not all exactly the same, these little black insects with their rhythmic movements, the same eyes, the same thoughts? — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

She carried the burn of the sun on her body. It was for all of those wasted, dull years. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

An ancient dictum says that when Zeus wanted to destroy someone, he would first drive him mad. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

By analogy, if we were to develop a soccer team, then we would not invite basketball and volleyball players to the try outs. We would invite soccer players to apply. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

D'Alembert was always surrounded by controversy ... he was the lightning rod which drew sparks from all the foes of the philosophes ... Unfortunately he carried this ... pugnacity into his scientific research and once he had entered a controversy, he argued his cause with vigour and stubbornness. He closed his mind to the possibility that he might be wrong ... — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

From that imbalance rose the tragic results of the coming together of two worlds. It was the extermination of an ancient dream by the frenzy of a modern one, the destruction of myths by a desire for power. It was gold, modern weapons, and rational thought pitted against magic and gods: the outcome could not have been otherwise. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Cold, still, lookin a little uncomfortable in death as if they weren't quite used to it yet. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

Horror is not unimaginable, it has neither the face of a monster nor the bat-wings of a demon. It is calm and tranquil, and it is durable, lasting whole days and nights, months; years, perhaps. It is not mortal. It strikes at the eyes, only the eyes. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

It is not the men who are in command of the bulldozers. It is the bulldozer who invented men, and then, since they failed to interest it, obliterated them with its muscular arm. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

The extremist, isolationist policies of Jean-Marie Le Pen have been rejected and crushed — Romano Prodi

There was no reason to label us as anti-Semitic. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

There is no such thing as self-awareness. Imagine thought retreating into itself to think about itself. It would be easier to imagine a revolver bullet extracting itself from its victim's wound and re-entering the barrel. Yes, it would be easier to imagine the universe's explosion suddenly halting its outflow of energy, so that the galaxies congeal once more, and the millions of light-years of their flight through space are immediately annulled. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

If one looks at all closely at the middle of our own century, the events that occupy us, our customs, our achievements and even our topics of conversation, it is difficult not to see that a very remarkable change in several respects has come into our ideas; a change which, by its rapidity, seems to us to foreshadow another still greater. Time alone will tell the aim, the nature and limits of this revolution, whose inconveniences and advantages our posterity will recognize better than we can. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

You must either suffer in this life or give up the hope of seeing God in Heaven. Sufferings and persecutions are of the greatest avail to us, because we can find therein a very efficient means to make atonement for our sins, since we are bound to suffer for them either in this world or in the next. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

The beginning and the end of love are both marked by embarrassment when the two find themselves alone.
[Fr., Le commencement et le declin de l'amour se font sentir par l'embarras ou l'on est de se trouver seuls.] — Jean De La Bruyere

Those policies [of Jean-Marie Le Pen ]I find repellent. I believe many people right across consist the world do. There is no future in that type of narrow minded racism and nationalism. — Rachel Maddow

I have no formal proof, but I dare not believe that Jean-Marie Le Pen would treat me as collateral damage in the battle he is having with the party. — Marion Marechal-Le Pen

Remorse goes to sleep during a prosperous period and wakes up in adversity.
[Fr., Le remords s'endort durant un destin prospere et s'aigrit dans l'adversite.] — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Abruptly, with the shock of the Conquest, the sober and puritanical man of the Christian Inquisition encountered, through their violent and upsetting nature, peoples who through their rituals were identified with the gods. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

It is, I believe, the primary charm of poetry to give the lesson of mirage, that is, to show the fragile and vibrant movement of creation, in which the word is in a certain way human quintessence, prayer. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

There is an Islamic population in France, most of which comes from the North African countries. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

Thus metaphysics and mathematics are, among all the sciences that belong to reason, those in which imagination has the greatest role. I beg pardon of those delicate spirits who are detractors of mathematics for saying this ... The imagination in a mathematician who creates makes no less difference than in a poet who invents ... Of all the great men of antiquity, Archimedes may be the one who most deserves to be placed beside Homer. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

l'after-shave, le badge, le barbeque, le best-seller, le blue-jean, le blues, le bluff, le box-office, le break, le bridge, le bulldozer, le business, le cake, la call-girl, le cashflow, le check-in, le chewing-gum, le club, le cocktail, la cover-girl, le cover-story, le dancing, le design, le discount, le do-it-yourself, le doping, le fan, le fast-food, le feedback, le freezer, le gadget, le gangster, le gay, le hall, le handicap, le hold-up, le jogging, l'interview, le joker, le kidnapping, le kit, le knock-out, le label, le leader, le look, le manager, le marketing, le must, les news, le parking, le pickpocket, le pipeline, le planning, le playboy, le prime time, le pub, le puzzle, se relaxer, le self-service, le software, le snack, le slogan, le steak, le stress, le sweatshirt, le toaster and le week-end. — Alexis Munier

In my speeches, I always condemned communism, national-socialism and fascism. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

In France, at least the German occupation was not especially inhumane, even if there were a number of excesses - inevitable in a country of 550,000 square kilometres ... If the Germans had carried out mass executions across the country as the received wisdom would have it, then there wouldn't have been any need for concentration camps for political deportees. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

I believe Jean-Marie Le Pen is a man of his word, and he will not go back on his words. — Marion Marechal-Le Pen

Freneuse is an oddball, an idler, without any aim in life! If you ask me, he has smoked too much opium in the East, and that explains his somnolence, his morbid lethargies. It's the hazardous legacy of bad habits! He has been comprehensively undone; the heavy influence of poisonous opiates never ceases to oppress him. Besides which, his steel-blue eyes are surely the eyes of a smoker of opium. He carries the drunken burden of hemp in his veins. Opium is like syphilis' - le Mazel released the word carelessly - 'it is a thing which stays for years and years in the blood, because the body is unable to purge itself. It must be absorbed, in the long run, by iodide. — Jean Lorrain

I'm not saying that the gas chambers didn't exist. I couldn't see them myself. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

Gaming is the destruction of all decorum; the prince forgets at it his dignity, and the lady her modesty. — Jean Le Rond D'Alembert

The world was a sick animal, a sort of huge cancerous tumour, a thing of bubbling liquids, whitish patches, dribbling pus, fantastic pimples of dead skin that grew in all directions, swelled up, became more and more like fuzzy hair. The right thing would be to go away, to vanish for ever from the face of the sun. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

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

The suffering caused by the terrorists is the real torture. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

There must be an authority, and we believe that the most qualified authority in a household is the man's. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

If you really want to know, I'd rather not have been born at all. I find life very tiring. The thing's done now, of course, and I can't alter it. But there will always be this regret at the back of my mind, I shall never quite be able to get rid of it, and it will spoil everything. The thing to do now is to grow old quickly, to eat up the years as fast as possible, looking neither right nor left. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current world without having an answer that is too schematic, too automatic. The novelist, he's not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He's someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions. — Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio

I like photographing the people I love, the people I admire, the famous, and especially the infamous. My last infamous subject was the extreme right wing French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen. — Helmut Newton

The much greater crimes of the Soviet Gulags occurred over decades and cost millions of lives. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

In recent years - before the intifada - there were three or four incidents of anti-Semitism a year, and that's out of 18 million crimes and violations of the law. — Jean-Marie Le Pen

We have received a communication from Jean le Flambeur. He claims that in precisely 57 minutes, he is going to steal a ring of Saturn. — Hannu Rajaniemi

Everyone sees drama from his own perspective. — Jean-Marie Le Pen