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

You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless.

One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day was; one cannot judge life until death.

For glory gives herself only to those who have always dreamed of her.

Belgium is a country invented by the British to annoy the French.

I have heard your views. They do not harmonize with mine. The decision is taken unanimously.

I’m not at all embarrassed to be a revolutionary.

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

You start out giving your hat, then you give your coat, then your shirt, then your skin and finally your soul.

We may go to the moon, but that’ s not very far. The greatest distance we have to cover still lies within us.

A great country worthy of the name does not have any friends.

To govern is always to choose among disadvantages.

Diplomats are useful only in fair weather. As soon as it rains they drown in every drop.

A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities.

I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

Greatness is a road leading towards the unknown.

How can one conceive of a one-party system in a country that has over two hundred varieties of cheese?

The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.

The power of generalizing ideas, of drawing comprehensive conclusions from individual observations, is the only acquirement, for an immortal being, that really deserves the name of knowledge.

They who pass their whole lives in working for their daily bread, have no ideas beyond their business or their interest, and all their understanding seems to lie in their fingers ends.

For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.

The organization of the entire texture of life according to an ideology can be fully carried out only under a totalitarian regime.

The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.

Reflection involves not simply a sequence of ideas, but a consequence – a consecutive ordering in such a way that each determines the next as its proper outcome, while each in turn leans back on its predecessors.

All human cognition begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to conceptions, and ends with ideas.