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

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.

Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished. Tomorrow, as today, I will speak on Radio London.

Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.

Politics, when it is an art and a service, not an exploitation, is about acting for an ideal through realities.

I am a man who belongs to no-one and who belongs to everyone.

The perfection preached in the gospels never yet built an empire. Every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning.

I respect only those who resist me, but I cannot tolerate them.

Old age is a shipwreck.

I grew up to always respect authority and respect those in charge.

The Jews remain what they have been at all times: an elite people, self-confident and domineering.

I feel not a person but an instrument of destiny.

Men can have friends, statesmen cannot.

It so happens that the world is undergoing a transformation to which no change that has yet occurred can be compared, either in scope or in rapidity.

I think we’re going to find, with climate change and everything else, things like global warming and goodness knows what else and the cost of fuel for a start, that things are going to become very complicated.

Climate change should be seen as the greatest challenge to face man and treated as a much bigger priority in the United Kingdom.

It is baffling, I must say, that in our modern world we have such blind trust in science and technology that we all accept what science tells us about everything – until, that is, it comes to climate science.

Scientists with access to data from Navy submarines traversing underneath the North polar ice cap have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months.

I don’t mind cloudy days. And how could I? My heart has cloudy days too.

You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

The warnings about global warming have been extremely clear for a long time. We are facing a global climate crisis. It is deepening. We are entering a period of consequences.

When it comes to climate, we can all make a big difference.