Falaise France Quotes

One need only admit the premise that public peace of mind is in danger and any action finds justification. All the horrors of the Reign of Terror in France were based entirely on solicitude for public tranquillity. ~ Leo Tolstoy

It is in the ability to deceive oneself that the greatest talent is shown. ~ Anatole France

Though, with the ascendancy of Louis, the political power of the nobles finally came to an end, France remained, in the whole complexion of her social life, completely aristocratic. ~ Lytton Strachey

Throughout the autumn and the winter activity increased in the Beaulieu area, and with it came mysteries. Lepe House, the mansion at the entrance to the river, was taken over by the Navy and became full of secretive Naval officers; it became known that this was part of a mysterious Navel entity called 'Force J'. Near Lepe House and at the very mouth of the river a construction gang began work in full strength to make a hard, sloping concrete platform running down into the river where the flat-bottomed landing craft could beach to refuel and let their ramps down to embark the vehicles and tanks. This place was about two miles from 'Mastodon'. A mile or so along the coast a country house was occupied by a secret Naval party who did strange things with tugs and wires and winches, and with what looked like a gigantic reel of cotton floating in the sea; this was 'Pluto', Pipe Line Under The Ocean, which was to lay pipes from England to France to carry petrol to supply the armies which were due to land in Normandy. On a bare beach nearby a thousand navvies were camped making huge concrete structures known as 'Phoenix', one of many such sites all along the coast. It was not till after the invasion that it became known that these were a part of the artificial harbour 'Mulberry' on the north coast of France. ~ Nevil Shute

It's a wonderful way to live, and not a bad way to go, either. The average Frenchman is still smiling three months after he's dead. ~ Bob Hope

The French delegates now wore a cynical smile as they argued before the commissions; they had their assurance that their armies were going to hold the Rhineland and the Sarre, and that a series of buffer states were to be set up between Germany and Russia, all owing their existence to France, all financed with the savings of the French peasants, and munitioned by Zaharoff, alias Schneider-Creusot. France and Britain were going to divide Persia and Mesopotamia and Syria and make a deal for the oil and the laying of pipelines. Italy was to take the Adriatic, Japan was to take Shantung - all such matters were being settled among sensible men. Lanny ~ Upton Sinclair

Contrary to a tenacious myth, France is not owned by California pension funds or the Bank of China, any more than the United States belongs to Japanese and German investors. The fear of getting into such a predicament is so strong today that fantasy often outstrips reality. The reality is that inequality with respect to capital is a far greater domestic issue than it is an international one. ~ Thomas Piketty

When Roy's 32nd Division arrived in France, the Great War had been grinding on for over three years. Though called the "War to End All Wars," it was the "War that Went on Forever" to those in it. The lines were static, the casualties horrendous, and hope for any breakthrough was fleeting. ~ Paul T. Dean

There is a saying of my adoptive ancestors. Though he performs a miracle, or two miracles, if he refuses the third miracle, it is not as profit to him. I shall dine at the Court of France tonight, and in the course of that evening, acquire the royal consent for O'LiamRoe and myself to stay as long as we please. For, to be perfectly frank," said Lymond, gently reflective, "to be perfectly frank, I can't wait to sink my teeth into the most magnificent, the most scholarly and the most dissolute Court in Europe, which so lightly slid out The O'LiamRoe, Chief of the Name, on his kneecaps and whiskers. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

France was an occupied country, a country that surrendered and was left without the right to choose. ~ Jean-Marie Le Pen

I was no longer capable of either enthusiasm or fear. Once an ecstatic idealist […], I had now passed - like the rest of my contemporaries who had survived thus far - into a permanent state of numb disillusion.

Whatever part of my brief adulthood I chose to look back upon - the restless pre-War months at home, the naïve activities of a college student, the tutelage to horror and death as a V.A.D. nurse, the ever-deepening night of fear and suspense and agony in a provincial town, in a university city, in London, in the Mediterranean, in France - it all seemed to have meant one thing, and one thing only, 'a striving, and a striving, and an ending in nothing.'

Now there were no more disasters to dread and no friends left to wait for; with the ending of apprehension had come a deep, nullifying blankness, a sense of walking in a thick mist which hid all sights and muffled all sounds. I had no further experience to gain from the War; nothing remained except to endure it. ~ Vera Brittain

In Turkey it was always 1952, in Malaysia 1937; Afghanistan was 1910 and Bolivia 1949. It is 20 years ago in the Soviet Union, 10 in Norway, five in France. It is always last year in Australia and next week in Japan. ~ Paul Theroux

Snyder was a progressive. Unlike Avery Brundage of the AOC and Dean Cromwell of USC, he was far from sympathetic to the Nazi cause. But his first loyalty was to Jesse Owens. He thought that if Owens got the chance to compete, he would win every event he entered. He knew, too, that then Owens would never have to look back. Of course, it is also crucial to remember that Snyder's opinion was not informed by the gift of foresight. Like the AOC, he did not know, as we now know, that there would be a holocaust, that Hitler and his regime would eventually kill millions, that the Germans would attack Poland, France, and the Soviet Union. If he had known, he would have felt differently about the boycott. But in 1935 it was still possible to assume that European Jewry was not on the precipice of extinction, just as it was possible to believe that Hitler was not quite a madman. Everyone knew that Hitler disliked the Jews, but few imagined that he would attempt to exterminate them. In ~ Jeremy Schaap

America in general is much more of a melting pot than anywhere in Europe, I think. Europe has a lot of different nationalities in each country, of course, but they never really seem to melt together. You can move to Germany, but you never really become a German. The same is very true of France, and I have been living there since the age of two. In America anyone can become a true American. ~ Jane L. Rosen

Whoever wants to tell a variety of stories ought to have a variety of beginnings. ~ Marie De France

My sense, although I don't remember discussing it with anyone, was that with the fall of France to the Nazis in June 1940, European civilization had collapsed. I also recalled that although both George Herbert Mead and John Dewey had been born in New England, they developed their distinctively American philosophy of pragmatism in Chicago. So thinking of my own New England roots, I decided to go to Chicago, which, seen through Carl Sandburg's eyes, was the opposite of European decadence: Hog Butcher for the World, Tool maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler, Stormy, husky, brawling. City of the Big Shoulders.7 ~ Grace Lee Boggs

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

In France, in Europe, the young artists of any generation always act as grandsons of some great man - Poussin, for example, or Victor Hugo. They can't help it. Even if they don't believe in that, it gets in their system. And so when they come to produce something of their own, the tradition is nearly indestructible. ~ Marcel Duchamp

The United States was the most unequal of the advanced industrial countries in the mid-1980s, and it has maintained that position.92 In fact, the gap between it and many other countries has increased: from the mid-1980s France, Hungary, and Belgium have seen no significant increase in inequality, while Turkey and Greece have actually seen a decrease in inequality. We are now approaching the level of inequality that marks dysfunctional societies - it is a club that we would distinctly not want to join, including Iran, Jamaica, Uganda, and the Philippines.93 Because we have so much inequality, and ~ Joseph E. Stiglitz

Italy and France could lop off their excessive wealth through a one-time tax on private wealth. ~ Edmund Phelps

Care of the mouth. - Technique of coughing and of spitting. Here is a personal observation.
A little girl did not know how to spit and each of her colds was aggravated as a result. I gathered this information. In her father's village and in his family in particular, au Berry, no one knows how to spit. I taught her how to spit. I gave her four sous per spit. As she wanted to have a bicycle, she learned how to spit. She was the first in the family to know how to spit.


(Marcel Mauss, "Les techniques du corps," in Anthropologze et Sociologze. [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1935, p. 383.) ~ Marcel Mauss

Today's tragedy in Paris reminds us very viscerally that it's a right that some people are inexplicably forced to die for. So it's very important tonight that I express that everybody who works at our comedy show, all of us are terribly sad for the families and people of France and anybody in the world tonight who now has to think twice before making a joke. It's not the way it's supposed to be. ~ Conan O'Brien

Mr. Churchill is proud of Britain's stand alone, after France had fallen and before America entered the War. ~ Eamon De Valera

But don't you ever tell me the Revolution will bring equality, because men'll never be equal. It's just not possible. They can turn the country upside down and inside out, there'll always be the big people and the little people, the fat ones and the thin ones. ~ Anatole France

I don't have any problem with coverage of victims in France. My heart goes out to anyone who was hurt or killed over there. ~ Lazarus Of Bethany

Veni, vidi, vici. That was easy for Julius Caesar to say; he crossed Italy in a chariot, not on a stupid bike." - Vivia ~ Leah Marie Brown

'Orange Is the New Black' was by far the most watched show in both France and Germany and, in fact, all of the markets that we launched. ~ Ted Sarandos

...when we were walking through Angkor War, I found myself wondering about what is lost when one culture is systematically annihilated so another can thrive in the name of progress. Think about it, what might have happened if Cambodia hadn't eventually been taken over by Siam and then France - what the Cambodians could offer the world if they're given the opportunity to follow through with what they're meant to become. ~ Kim Fay

Countries with high levels of atheism are also the most charitable both in terms of the percentage of their wealth they devote to social welfare programs and the percentage they give in aid to the developing world. The dubious link between Christian literalism and Christian values is belied by other indices of social equality. Consider the ratio of salaries paid to top-tier CEOs and those paid to the same firms' average employees: in Britain it is 24:1; in France, 15:1; in Sweden, 13:1; in the United States, where 80 percent of the population expects to be called before God on Judgment Day, it is 475:1. Many a camel, it would seem, expects to pass easily through the eye of a needle. ~ Sam Harris

Like the Devil, the Norway lobster is known by a variety of different names: cigala in Spain, langoustine in France, Dublin Bay Prawn in Ireland. And in Italy, as well as the U.K., scampi. ~ Tom Parker Bowles

That if a civil war should break out in France, it would take a while to reach the south-west. I knew next to nothing about the south-west, really, only that it was a region where they ate duck confit, and duck confit struck me as incompatible with civil war. ~ Michel Houellebecq

Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

That hemisphere of the moon which faces us is better known than the earth itself; its vast desert plains have been surveyed to within a few acres; its mountains and craters have been measured to within a few yards; while on the earth's surface there are 30,000,000 square kilometres (sixty times the extent of France), upon which the foot of man has never trod, which the eye of man has never seen. ~ Camille Flammarion

I thought English is a strange language. Now I think French is even more strange. In France, their fish is poisson, their bread is pain, and their pancake is crepe. Pain and poison and crap. That's what they have every day. ~ Xiaolu Guo

These are fashionable people who call themselves philosophers. ~ Noam Chomsky

When I came back from France they all wanted me to go to college. I couldn't. After what I'd been through I felt I couldn't go back to school. I learnt nothing at my prep school anyway. I felt I couldn't enter into a freshman's life. They wouldn't have liked me. I didn't want to act a part I didn't feel. And I didn't think the instructors would teach me the sort of things I wanted to know. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

The man who ten years earlier and one year later was considered a bandit and outlaw is sent a two-day sail from France, to an island given into his possession, with his guards and several million, which are paid to him for some reason. ~ Leo Tolstoy

All you crazy white people "I'm American!", all you did was come out of your mother's pussy on American soil. That's it. That's it! What, you think you're better than somebody from France 'cause you came out of a pussy in Detroit? ~ Chris Rock

But sweetly and discreetly love passes from person to person, from heart to heart, or it is nothing worth. ~ Marie De France

Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue. ~ Anatole France

It's funny, I started by making fake American movies, 'The Transporter' and stuff like that. I was shooting in France, but everything was in English. But then afterwards, I was looking at real French movies like the Jacques Audiard movies. ~ Louis Leterrier

That Paris exists and anyone could choose to live anywhere else in the world will always be a mystery to me. ~ Marion Cotillard

My husband is a general's chauffeur somewhere in France. ~ Lillie Langtry

A dictionary is merely the universe arranged in alphabetical order. ~ Anatole France

Stupidity is far more dangerous than evil, for evil takes a break from time to time, stupidity does not. ~ Anatole France

Above Constance's desk were nude photographs of women in 1930s France, draped in provocative poses. She had put them there for Bob's viewing pleasure and in return he had placed African art of naked men above his desk for her. ~ Cecelia Ahern

I am of the religion of all those who are brave and good. ~ Henry IV Of France

I was praised in the U.S. and heavily, brutally criticized in France. ~ Christine Lagarde

In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example and France has followed it, of charters of power granted by liberty. This revolution in the practice of the world may, with an honest praise, be pronounced the most triumphant epoch of its history and the most consoling presage of its happiness. ~ James Madison