Great Throughts Treasury

"I believe in the virtue of traditions, and I recall having often spoken this phrase: “Memory is revolutionary.” If one has the ambition of preparing the century to come, breaking with the past or being ignorant of its amounts to cutting one’s own roots and drying up on the spot."

"Everything is a struggle, everything requires courage, effort. There is no response to history without effort, and effort is required because everything is difficult: passions, interests, rivalries, mankind just emerging from prehistory. Just look around us. Yes, history is tragic."

"A man loses contact with reality if he is not surrounded by his books."

"Behind each great man, there's a Richard Delisle."

"Communism is born out of misery, and if the West does not show more understanding, those people will take up arms and turn to others, that is the Soviet Union."

"For me Greece is Maria Farantouri. This is how I imagined Goddess Hera to be: strong, pure and vigilant. I have never encountered any other artist able to give me such a strong sense of the divine."

"France is delighted at this new opportunity to show the world ... that when one has the will one can succeed in joining peoples who have been brought close by history."

"I am the way I am, and I have no need to evolve in order to affirm my identity."

"I was born during one world war, and when I was 20, I fought in a second world war. I was young at a time when Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, Stalin and a few others were on European soil. All that passes under our eyes proves that we do not live in a peaceful and harmonious world."

"I believe in the forces of the spirit, and I won't leave you."

"In such countries, genocide is not too important."

"I loved this country where everyone greets passers-by and opens his door wide. Looking at America, every voyager has the eyes of Christopher Columbus."

"Since each nation is undergoing a crisis, they all tend toward egotism. Each country first wants to rescue itself, whereas they will only be rescued together."

"Mere ability is not sufficient to explain great destinies. The last yards are run alone."

"There exists in our country a solid continuity of Bonapartism, where the vocation for grandeur of France, the monarchist tradition, and the passion for national unity, the Jacobin tradition get together."

"The industrialized countries need the economic recovery of the Third World, need these billions of human beings, potential buyers of our products. This is not only a generous attitude, it is a self-serving one."

"To every reversal of people’s sovereignty, to every disappearance of the Republic corresponds a frank or disguised restitution in force of the regal justice. ‘’Tell me, according to what you judge and I’ll tell you who you are… No axiom in politics is more certain than this."

"War is not solely past, it can be our future, and these are you, ladies and gentlemen deputies, who are the guardians of our peace, our security and our future."

"What has begun in this evening will not stay for a long time, and because you represent the forces of the world of labor, you, forces of the youth, your victory is inevitable."

"What I demand you is almost impossible, for one has to defeat our history. And nevertheless, if one does not defeat it, one has to know a rule that imposes itself: nationalism, this is war! War is not solely past, it can be our future, and these are you, ladies and gentlemen deputies, who are the guardians of our peace, our security and our future."

"We learn only when it is too late that the marvel is the passing moment."

"You have to give time time."