Wars The French Quotes & Sayings

I do think you are supposed to go through wars with your child because otherwise the tearing apart that has to happen when they go off to lead their own life would be unbearable. — Dawn French

The war, like all wars, was proving more expensive for the Bourbons than planned. Since the alliance, France had advanced to the Americans over 100 million livres, about $25 million, in loans, supplies and gifts, and before it was over the cost of the American war for France would amount, by some estimates, to 1.5 billion livres, a historic sum that was virtually to bankrupt the French national budget and require the summoning of the Estates General in 1789 that led to the arrest of the King and the sequence of eruptions that became the French Revolution. — Barbara W. Tuchman

While I fold laundry I memorize things for school,
dates of wars:
French ones, African ones, Russian ones,
battles of all ugly kinds.
It's a shame to have us hopeful young students
learn these horrible things.
Exactly the kind of behaving
they have told us over and over again not to do
is what the history class is full of,
full-grown adults making these wars:
killing each other for land, for religions,
for greed and more greed,
Why bother to have children and educate them
and invent things to make their lives better,
just to send them off to war and get slaughtered? — Virginia Euwer Wolff

Half a world away, on the same Friday, the Chamber of Deputies in France opened debate on paying the United States a debt of 25 million francs (about $5 million) as an indemnity for French damage to American shipping during the Napoleonic wars. France had agreed to pay the money under an 1831 treaty, but after four days of consideration, by a margin of eight, France declined to honor its obligations. — Jon Meacham

On the heels of the Enlightenment came the French Revolution: a brief promise of democracy followed by a train of regicides, putsches, fanatics, mobs, terrors, and preemptive wars, culminating in a megalomaniacal emperor and an insane war of conquest. More than a quarter of a million people were killed in the Revolution and its aftermath, and another 2 to 4 million were killed in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In reflecting on this catastrophe, it was natural for people to reason, "After this, therefore because of this," and for intellectuals on the right and the left to blame the Enlightenment. This is what you get, they say, when you eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, — Steven Pinker

In all their wars against the French they [the Americans] never showed such conduct, attention and perseverance as they do now. — Thomas Gage

Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of facts will certainly reject my theory. — Charles Darwin

The French have so many civil wars, they can win one now and again. — John Cleese

But there is nothing which one saint was, that you may not be. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Not one of our political spokespeople - the same is true of the Arabs since Abdel Nasser's time - ever speaks with self-respect and dignity of what we are, what we want, what we have done, and where we want to go. In the 1956 Suez War, the French colonial war against Algeria, the Israeli wars of occupation and dispossession, and the campaign against Iraq, a war whose stated purpose was to topple a specific regime but whose real goal was the devastation of the most powerful Arab country. And just as the French, British, Israeli, and American campaign against Gamal Abdel Nasser was designed to bring down a force that openly stated as its ambition the unification of the Arabs into a very powerful independent political force. — Edward W. Said

According to legend, when a monkey survived a shipwreck off the north-east coast near Hartlepool during the Napoleonic wars, it was hanged as a suspected French spy. The monkey did not help its defense by being dressed in a French navy uniform when it was found, or by refusing to answer its interrogators (some local fishermen) in English. The sounds that came from the monkey were assumed to be French, and so the monkey was strung up at the beach. — Chris Roberts

Because I believe in God, I believe the Good, what's right, is worth fighting for. - John Barrett Jr. — Frank E. Peretti

The Burgundian chronicler Philippe de Commines thought the English a choleric, earthy, and volatile people, who nevertheless made good, brave soldiers. In fact he regarded their warlike inclinations as one of the chief causes of the Wars of the Roses. If they could not fight the French, he believed, they fought each other. — Alison Weir

Much as slavery in the United States was part of a larger Atlantic Slave System, so America's War of Independence was an outgrowth of Europe's Seven Years' War - from 1756 to 1763 - and also a precursor or harbinger of the French and Haitian revolutions and of the subsequent Latin American wars for independence from Spain. — David Brion Davis

Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. — Ayn Rand

So what? German or French, friend or enemy, he's first and foremost a man and I'm a woman. He's good to me, kind, attentive ... that's good enough for me. I'm not looking for anything else. Our lives are complicated enough with all these wars and bombings. Between a man and a woman, none of that's important. I couldn't care less if the man I fancy is English or black - I'd still offer myself to him if I got the opportunity. — Irene Nemirovsky

The English soldier was probably the worst-treated soldier in Europe, and judging from the English casualty rates during the Napoleonic wars, English generals were more lavish with their soldiers' lives than were their French and German colleagues. — J. Christopher Herold

Novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to. We mostly win wars, they lose them. Of course, they did hide more Jews than many other countries, and this is a form of winning. — Anne Lamott

Feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away. Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long eight-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung — Joseph Conrad

I fought to stay awake and keep the car on the road. And I thought back to texts I had read from the British Army in India, during the Raj, at the height of their empire. Young subalterns trapped in junior ranks had their own mess. They would dine together in splendid dress uniforms and talk about their chances of promotion. But they had none, unless a superior officer died. Dead men's shoes was the rule. So they would raise their crystal glasses of fine French wine and toast "bloody wars and dread diseases" because a casualty further up the chain of command was their only way to get ahead. Brutal, but that's how it's always been, in the military. — Lee Child

An alliance with France was enlisted in the war for independence from Britain, then loosened in the aftermath, as France undertook revolution and embarked on a European crusade in which the United States had no direct interest. When President Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address - delivered in the midst of the French revolutionary wars - counseled that the United States "steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world" and instead "safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies," he was issuing not so much a moral pronouncement as a canny judgment about how to exploit America's comparative advantage: the United States, a fledgling power safe behind oceans, did not have the need or the resources to embroil itself in continental controversies over the balance of power. — Henry Kissinger

There is an old French curse: may your fondest wish come true. If this treatment is cheap and available to everyone, it will destroy the earth through overpopulation. If it is dear and available only to the very rich, it will cause riots, wars, a breakdown of the social contract. Either way, it will lead directly to human misery. What is the value of a long life, when it is lived in squalor and unhappiness? — Douglas Preston

Here is the irony: Europe dominated the world, but it failed to dominate itself. For five hundred years Europe tore itself apart in civil wars, and as a result there was never a European empire - there was instead a British empire, a Spanish empire, a French empire, a Portuguese empire, and so on. — George Friedman

Meditation and prayer are my secret weapons, and when I use them, I can move mountains. — Syesha Mercado

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution. — Edvard Munch

But France's powerful armies, and a very large number of fortresses, ensure that the French Sovereign will possess the throne forever, and they do not have anything to fear now concerning internal wars or their neighbors invading France. — Frederick The Great

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech - and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives - he called them enemies! - hidden out of sight somewhere. — Joseph Conrad

No one knows any longer whether the reintroduction of the bear in Pyrenees, kolkhozes, aerosols, the Green Revolution, the anti-smallpox vaccine, Star Wars, the Muslim religion, partridge hunting, the French Revolution, service industries, labour unions, cold fusion, Bolshevism, relativity, Slovak nationalism, commercial sailboats, and so on, are outmoded, up to date, futuristic, atemporal, nonexistent, or permanent. — Bruno Latour

All the land our forefathers had was a little strip of country, here between the mountains and the ocean. All the way from here west was Indian country, and Spanish and French and English country. It was farmers that took all that country and made it America." "How?" Almanzo asked. "Well, son, the Spaniards were soldiers, and high-and-mighty gentlemen that only wanted gold. And the French were fur-traders, wanting to make quick money. And England was busy fighting wars. But we were farmers, son; we wanted the land. It was farmers that went over the mountains, and cleared the land, and settled it, and farmed it, and hung on to their farms. — Laura Ingalls Wilder

Religions were never meant to be followed but thought for. It turned nasty when was turned into human ego, blasted straight out of furnace of hatred for fellow being. — Kunal Narayan Uniyal

Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not Guilty to an indictment denouncing him (with infinite jingle and jangle) for that he was a false traitor to our serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, prince, our Lord the King, by reason of his having, on divers occasions, and by divers means and ways, assisted Lewis, the French King, in his wars against our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth; that was to say, by coming and going, between the dominions of our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, and those of the said French Lewis, and wickedly, falsely, traitorously, and otherwise evil-adverbiously, revealing to the said French Lewis what forces our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, had in preparation to send to Canada and North America. — Charles Dickens

When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either. — Leo Burnett