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

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.

Always choose the hardest way, on it you will not find opponents.

Love is the strongest force the world possesses, and yet it is the Greatness is a road leading towards the unknown.

The leader must aim high, see big, judge widely, thus setting himself apart form the ordinary people who debate in narrow confines.

These people really aim very badly.

Only peril can bring the French together. One can’t impose unity out of the blue on a country that has 265 different kinds of cheese.

I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French.

We need the real, nation-wide terror which reinvigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.

Observe that anyone who dies for his country is a fortunate man, but death takes what it wants, indiscriminately, in peace-time as well as in war. It is better to die with freedom than without it.

I’ve seen my name on marquees and bowed to standing ovations. I’ve also been called a fraud, a mental case, a heretic. People all over the country wait in line to hug me or curse me.

Citizenship consists in the service of the country.

No country or people who are slaves to dogma and dogmatic mentality can progress.

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter – and to write it in the books of law.

We Marxists believe that revolution will occur in other countries, as well. But it will occur at a time when it will be considered possible or necessary by revolutionaries of those countries.

We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us.