“The true statesman is the one who is willing to take risks.”

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.

Hearing Mass is the ceremony I most favor during my travels. Church is the only place where someone speaks to me and I do not have to answer back.

Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

My sister was the singer, and I always had the mentality there could only be one in the family.

Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone.

One’s not half two. It’s two are halves of one.

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.

Friends come and go but I wouldn’t have thought you’d be one of them.

We can look for beauty in the mirror, but the mirror only reflects one aspect of who we are.

Beware of confining yourself to a particular belief and denying all else, for much good would elude you – indeed, the knowledge of reality would elude you. Be in yourself a matter for all forms of belief, for God is too vast and tremendous to be restricted to one belief rather than another.