“How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?”

My dear and old country, here we are once again together faced with a heavy trial.

The desire of privilege and the taste of equality are the dominant and contradictory passions of the French of all times.

All my life I have had a certain idea of France.

You’ll live. Only the best get killed.

Don’t think of yourself as indispensable or infallible. The cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.

Never relinquish the initiative.

How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?

Men are of no importance. What counts is who commands.

No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.

France has lost the battle but she has not lost the war.

History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads.

Difficulty attracts the man of character because it is in embracing it that he realizes himself.

Every Frenchman wants to enjoy one or more privileges; that’s the way he shows his passion for equality.

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.

The leader is always alone before bad fates.

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.

Over time, we as humans have developed a different attitude towards nature and we’ve forgotten about our inner power.

Different people have different ways of doing things. For me, becoming a songwriter first and falling in love with the Nashville songwriting community and the process of songs and getting better and putting more in what I wanted to say, was absolutely vital in me even wanting to be an artist.

Our religion seems foolish to you, but so does yours to me. The Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians and the Catholics all have a different God. Why cannot we have one of our own?

You said you loved the chaos, so how was I any different?

Our starting point is not the individual: We do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked. Our objectives are different: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.

He put in your heart certain wishes and plans; in my heart he put other different desires.

Loving you became just a different way to hate myself.

The Earth should not be cut up into hundreds of different sections, each inhabited by a self-defined segment of humanity that considers its own welfare and its own “national security” to be paramount above all other consideration.