French Imperialism Quotes

The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, 'We're sorry we did it,' that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it's just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, 'We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.' Then you will see the beginnings of civilization. ~ Noam Chomsky

At the time he seemed both ancient and French, but the wisdom that has come with age tells me he was thirty-two and faking the accent. ~ Joel Derfner

To me there are two Hitlers: one who existed until the end of the French war; the other begins with the Russian campaign. In the beginning he was genial and pleasant. He would have extraordinary willpower and unheard-of influence on people. The important thing to remember is that the first Hitler, the man who I knew until the end of the French war, had much charm and goodwill. He was always frank. The second Hitler, who existed from the beginning of the Russian campaign until his suicide, was always suspicious, easily upset, and tense. He was distrustful to an extreme degree. ~ Hermann Goring

Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven. ~ William Wordsworth

The main thing is, the constraints have come off style. What we are saying now is that the Revolution does not proceed in a pitiless, forward direction, its politics and its language becoming ever more gross and simplistic: the Revolution is always flexible, subtle, elegant. ~ Hilary Mantel

When the sommelier Enrico Bernardo moved to Paris from Italy nearly two decades ago, the world of French gastronomy brutally rejected him. No matter that he had won the competition for best sommelier in Italy; when he asked 30 restaurateurs for work in their wine cellars, all turned him down. ~ Elaine Sciolino

The land of opportunity", "The American dream", "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness": these are the sounds of the great sucking mechanism of the American parasite. The reliance of seduction and persuasion over coercion that sold democracy to the American people eventually sold it to the rest of the world. Although there are a minority of examples of the direct parasitism of involuntary immigration, especially slaves from Africa and the "legal" incorporation of Native Americans, voluntary immigration through the lure of freedom and and equality is only a more indirect form of parasitic predation. What is voluntary can be no less predatory than coercion, just as capitalism can be no less predatory than military imperialism. From the point of view of competition among nations, the point is not whether a citizen or their ancestor originally arrived voluntarily or involuntarily, but whether a nation or ideology is successful in harnessing its human resources towards its national interest or way of life. American parasitism works because it offers the secular Judaism of liberalism rather than the secular Christianity of communism. Communism could never compete with the immigrant American hope that they themselves might one day be a filthy rich capitalist. ~ Mitchell Heisman

It made me comfortable. It was a house where you could put your feet up and drink French champagne or Ballarat Bitter according to your mood. ~ Peter Carey

Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

I do a real analysis of who actually owns things - it's the British ... the Dutch ... then it's the Arabs ... then it's the French ... then it's the Jews ... and then, on down the line. ~ Alex Jones

From the distance of England the Italian cuisine seems to be all things to all people. It does not expect you to bend to its rigor, like the French. It is not rough and boisterous like the Spanish. It is soft and feminine and is adored in the highest circles, though it is not above a degree of prostitution too. But first and foremost it is kind to children. Consider the pizza: all around the world the pizza has come to represent the deepest form of security known to the human palate. It is like a smiling face: it assuages the fear of complexity by showing everything on its surface. ~ Rachel Cusk

No way, that would kill my diet for the week. I don't know how you can stand to eat so unhealthy, Quinn.
Just consider it an amuse-biatch. ~ Steph Campbell

Anyone who studies the state of things which preceded the French Revolution will see that the tremendous catastrophe came about from so excessive a regulation of men's actions in all their details, and such an enormous drafting away of the products of their actions to maintain the regulating organization, that life was fast becoming impracticable. And if we ask what then made, and now makes, this error possible, we find it to be the political superstition that governmental power is subject to no restraints. ~ Herbert Spencer

ominous murmur ran through the legion of onlookers, who had heretofore maintained an uncharacteristic silence. Their resentment was palpable. Five days later Coligny was assassinated, and the streets of Paris ran with blood as the entire Huguenot wedding party was hunted down and slaughtered in one of the most infamous episodes in French history, known today as the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. But this horrific mass murder, which claimed more than five thousand martyrs over the course of a week, was no spontaneous bloodletting. Rather, it was the denouement of a carefully constructed plot that utilized the unsuspecting Margot as both victim and bait to lure Coligny and his faction to their doom, an intrigue planned, instigated, and executed by the one individual in France powerful enough ~ Nancy Goldstone

Described in this way, utilitarianism has little in common with the prosaic, visionless notion of the 'merely utilitarian,' in the sense of a narrowly or mundanely functional or efficient option. No such limited horizon confined the thought and character of the great English-language utilitarian philosophers, whose influence ran its course from the period just before the French Revolution through the Victorian era. Happiness, for them, was more of a cosmic calling, the path to world progress, and whatever was deemed 'utilitarian' had to be useful for that larger and inspiring end, the global minimization of pointless suffering and the global maximization of positive well-being or happiness. It invokes, ultimately, the point of view of universal benevolence. And it is more accurately charged with being too demanding ethically than with being too accommodating of narrow practicality, material interests, self-interestedness, and the like. ~ Bart Schultz

Mindy Sue, you are a pretty, lively, successful female, fluent in French and German. You are a professional woman but also sportif. You care buckets, I can see that. How did you get yourself in this terrible predicament? How did you become a four-line seventy-five-cents-a-word advertisement in the back pages of The New York Review of Books? ~ Donald Barthelme

His eyes narrowed. "Is this where the elephants come in? Because there was something about elephants in that French book. ~ J. Kathleen Cheney

I mean, remember what the Vietnam War was fought for, after all. The Vietnam War was fought to prevent Vietnam from becoming a successful model of economic and social development for the Third World. And we don't want to lose the war, Washington doesn't want to lose the war. So far we've won: Vietnam is no model for development, it's a model for destruction. But if the Vietnamese could ever pull themselves together somehow, Vietnam could again become such a model―and that's no good, we always have to prevent that. ~ Noam Chomsky

The only thing strong about the French Army is their damn body odor. ~ Dwayne Johnson

It's all about the "French Paradox," that much-publicized puzzle of how French people eat all that fatty food and drink tons of wine, yet still manage to be svelte and sophisticated, not to mention cheese-eating surrender monkeys. ~ Julie Powell

In the memory of a rose, no one has ever seen a gardener die! ~ French Proverb

'I hate discussions of feminism that end up with who does the dishes,' she said. So do I. But at the end, there are always the damned dishes. ~ Marilyn French

What is history? Any thoughts, Webster?'
'History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly.
'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated ...
'Finn?'
'"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." (quoting Patrick Lagrange) ~ Julian Barnes

Canada was for me very much Sweden, you know? Very much open people, that they read books, they go see films. I felt at home in Canada. And also, you speak French. ~ Michael Nyqvist

Just because you win the French Open it doesn't mean you can do well at Wimbledon. ~ Li Na

We stand todaybefore the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, the victory of socialism. ~ Rosa Luxemburg

Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capitalism is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed. ~ Vladimir Lenin

Racism is not simply about one man's irrational hatred of another but his self-hatred, doubting his own moral goodness and purpose. ~ Michael R. French

Some people use bullfights, some the Mass, some art in order to ritualize or transform death into life or at least meaning. But my terror is that life itself is a ritual transforming everything into death. ~ Marilyn French

As the seventeenth-century French philosopher Montaigne once said, "My life has been filled with terrible misfortune, most of which never happened. ~ Kristin Neff

Green tea?"
"You can't be serious."
The old woman nodded her approval. "I wasn't."
"Because you know when a cow chews grass? And he or she chews and chews and chews? Well, green tea tastes like French-kissing that cow after it's done chewing all that grass. ~ David Levithan