French Revolutionary Quotes

In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. [...] It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. [...] The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic ~ Slavoj Zizek

An alliance with France was enlisted in the war for independence from Britain, then loosened in the aftermath, as France undertook revolution and embarked on a European crusade in which the United States had no direct interest. When President Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address - delivered in the midst of the French revolutionary wars - counseled that the United States "steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world" and instead "safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies," he was issuing not so much a moral pronouncement as a canny judgment about how to exploit America's comparative advantage: the United States, a fledgling power safe behind oceans, did not have the need or the resources to embroil itself in continental controversies over the balance of power. ~ Henry Kissinger

She glanced across to where Tilly and her brand new husband were posing for photographs, Tilly fluttering a fan coquettishly in front of her face. 'Unfortunately I didn't realise there was a French Revolutionary theme.'
'The Marie-Antoinette thing?' said Dexter. 'Well at least we know there'll be cake. ~ David Nicholls

The repeated claim before the 'seizure of power' - that the NSDAP, as a national social-revolutionary movement, and not simply another political party ... would create new bonds of unity through its elimination and transcending of the party system, was highly attractive and conveyed much of Nazism's dynamic appeal. ~ Ian Kershaw

The hemming and hawing is courtesy of Mrs. Duchamps, head of nursing, a small, snippy woman who always seems to know best. She's French: she should have stayed in France. Arrogant and unsympathetic, but she does have a cute French accent. ~ Hendrik Groen

The best way to lose weight is to put the handle of the fridge two inches from the ground. ~ Dawn French

Islam may soon become the majority religion in countries whose churches have been turned more and more into tourist sites, apartment houses, theatres, and places of entertainment. The French scholar Olivier Roy is right: Islam is now a European religion. ~ Ian Buruma

Motherhood had been metamorphosing Marie Antoinette into a more grounded and responsible woman. Her pregnancies had necessitated several months' absence from her usual round of gay amusements and she discovered that it was more fun to spend time with her children than it had been to play faro deep into the wee hours of the morning.
But her reputation as a frivolous, extravagant ninny and the marital issues in the royal bed had already demonized her in the eyes of the people at all levels of society. ~ Leslie Carroll

There is a bright spot or two for the Spaniards. French toast has become freedom toast on the Air Force One breakfast menu, but the Spanish omelet is still a Spanish omelet. ~ Suzanne Fields

I saw this French woman, this English man in Italy. It was a film [Certified Copy] I knew well, but I had already seen it, and I was familiar with it, and I had no feeling of anxiety or responsibility toward it. ~ Abbas Kiarostami

To understand Europe, you have to be a genius - or French. ~ Madeleine Albright

Mastering the Art of French Cooking ... doesn't mean it has to be fancy cooking, although it can be as elaborate as you wish. ~ Julia Child

It doesn't take money to have style, it just takes a really good eye. Sometimes you can find amazing culinary antiques that will make it feel like an old French kitchen. ~ Tyler Florence

The French: a people who have used their sophisticated culture and beautiful language to bequeath to the world the sliced potato. ~ Bauvard

Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek. ~ Robert Fitzgerald

I wonder how much I can tell Rowan about this. I need another girl's analysis.

My phone pings, and it's her.

RF: Need to skip lunch. Meeting with teacher for Hon French project. You OK?

Well, there goes that. I text back that I'm fine.

Lunch is grilled cheese, green beans, and Tater Tots. I can already feel my pores clogging, but I didn't bring anything, and the alternative is ice cream on a stick.

I head toward the back of the cafeteria, intending to go outside to sit on the quad and obsess over The Dark's emails, but I spot Rev and Declan sitting at a table in the corner. Well, I assume it's Rev. It could be some other broad-shouldered guy in a hoodie, but I doubt it. ~ Brigid Kemmerer

As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s. ~ Robert Darnton

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, "Musing among the vegetables?" - was that it? - "I prefer men to cauliflowers" - was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace - Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished - how strange it was! - a few sayings like this about cabbages. ~ Virginia Woolf

The French in particular confuse unadorned direct language with a lack of culture or intellectual elegance. ~ A.A. Gill

If you want a couple of weeks in bed (as I did, bi-annually), and if you have indolent and credulous parents, it's amazing what a few packs of French cigarettes will do. ~ Martin Amis

One of the many advantages of having a boyfriend who is half French is that his culinary repertoire extends beyond mac and cheese. Plus, there's the kissing. ~ Meg Cabot

My wife and I have spent most of our lives in France, and we are both pretty well bilingual, my wife more purely than I, since as a little girl she went to school in French Switzerland. ~ Patrick O'Brian

Funny business, a woman's career. The things you drop on your way up the ladder
so you can move faster
you forget you'll need them when you go back to being a woman. That's one career all females have in common whether we like it or not. Being a woman. Sooner or later, we've got to work at it, no matter what other careers we've had or wanted. And in the last analysis nothing is any good unless you can look up just before dinner
or turn around in bed
and there he is. Without that you're not a woman. You're someone with a French provincial office
or a book full of clippings. But you're not a woman. Slow curtain. The end. (from "All About Eve") ~ Bette Davis

There is a belief that love has its own justification, that it should be experienced as passionately as possible. The French have a wonderful expression, amour passion, which is the ultimate. ~ Marilyn Yalom

The last time the French asked for 'more proof' it came marching into Paris under a German flag ~ David Letterman

I tend to curse in French more often than I do in English. ~ Alaina Huffman

This is one of the things I don't like so much about French cinema - we have tendency to concentrate on actors and dialogue and we don't care so much about the visual aspect. I love when you use all the elements at your disposal. ~ Jean-Pierre Jeunet

I will stipulate to having both French sea salt and a big bottle of extra virgin in my kitchen. And while the presence of both might go some small distance in pigeonholing me demographically, neither one of them makes me a good person. They are mute and useless indicators of the content of my character. ~ David Rakoff

The leaky-replacement hypothesis - assuming for the moment that it's correct - provides the strongest possible evidence for the closeness of Neanderthals and modern humans. The two may or may not have fallen in love; still, they made love. Their hybrid children may or may not have been regarded as monsters; nevertheless someone - perhaps Neanderthals at first, perhaps humans - cared for them. Some of these hybrids survived to have kids of their own, who, in turn, had kids, and so on up to the present day. Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA. One ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

I phoned the Admiral back.
'It's no use, Admiral, the French speak nothing but French.'
There was a short pause on the end of the line then his voice rattled into life like a sabre.
'They're lying, Tim!'
'What?'
'The French Navy must by law speak English, as English is the international maritime language of the sea.'
'Has anyone told the French that?'
The line went dead for a moment before he thundered, 'Yes Nelson. At the battle of Trafalgar.'
I tried to stifle an irresistibly British giggle not knowing if the Admiral was making a joke or not. I got it right. He was serious. ~ Tim FitzHigham

Roughly speaking, any man with energy and enthusiasm ought to be able to bring at least a dozen others round to his opinion in the course of a year no matter how absurd that opinion might be. We see every day in politics, in business, in social life, large masses of people brought to embrace the most revolutionary ideas, sometimes within a few days. It is all a question of getting hold of them in the right way and working on their weak points. ~ Aleister Crowley

Ma vie est une énigme dont ton nom est le mot. (My life is an enigma, of which your name is the word.) ~ Victor Hugo

We think of and talk about the Industrial Revolution as a singular event, but in reality, it spanned decades. It wasn't really a revolution but a gradual evolution with revolutionary implications. ~ Alex Moazed

I like how writing can take you off for a jaunt in your head and then set you back down in the chair where you've been all along. ~ Georgann Low

Why don't they allow professional wrestling at the Olympics? They allow pro basketball players and hockey players. Olympic pro wrestling would be awesome. The team from Mexico could wear those Mr. X masks. The French wrestler could hit his opponent with a baguette. Or perhaps just surrender. ~ Craig Ferguson

History likewise shows that sometimes the 'monetary standard of the victors' can prove to be very bad. There have seldom been more brilliant victories than those eventually achieved by the American insurgents under Washington against the English troops. But the American 'continental dollar did not benefit from them. The more proudly the star-spangled banner rose on high, the lower did the exchange-rate fall, until, at the very moment when the victory of the rebels was secured, the dollar became entirely valueless. The course of events was no different not long afterwards in France. In spite of the victories of the revolutionary army, the metal premium rose. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

The range had been exceptional. An apartment balcony fourteen hundred yards away had been identified as the rifleman's hide. Fourteen hundred yards is more than three-quarters of a mile. The French president had been at an open-air podium behind ~ Lee Child

Despite the rigid classicism of the famous Paris Opera school and company, the French have done more than their share to unmoor la Danse from its traditions and standards. ~ Robert Gottlieb

You will do well to take advantage of Madame's short residence to get up your French a little ... You will be glad of this, my dear, when you have reached France, where you will find they speak nothing else. ~ J. Sheridan Le Fanu

I am always doing what I thought I couldn't do because I Thought I might learn something.
Henri Marcel French Artist ~ Brenda H. Sedgwick

We need to actually teach kids that books aren't like broccoli. You don't have to eat every bit on your plate. It's like secret adult's business. It's the secret we never, ever tell our children. No adult ever read a book because it's good for us. We read because it is fun. ~ Jackie French

Don't hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don't hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table. ~ Calvin Coolidge

The Italians are wise before the deede, the Germanes in the deede, the French after the deede.
[The Italians are wise before the deed, the Germens in the deed, the French after the deed.] ~ George Herbert

Side by side ... the British and French peoples have advanced to rescue ... mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history. Behind them ... gather a group of shattered States and bludgeoned races: the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians
upon all of whom the long night of barbarism will descend, unbroken even by a star of hope, unless we conquer, as conquer we must; as conquer we shall. ~ Winston Churchill

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

No, Emma, your amiable young man can be amiable only in French, not in English. He may be very 'aimable,' have very good manners, and be very agreeable; but he can have no English delicacy towards the feelings of other people: nothing really amiable about him. ~ Jane Austen

Although the defects of the Russian Army were notorious, although the Russian winter, not the Russian Army, had turned Napoleon back from Moscow, although it had been defeated on its own soil by the French and British in the Crimea, although the Turks in 1877 had outfought it at the siege of Plevna and only succumbed later to overwhelming numbers, although the Japanese had outfought it in Manchuria, a myth of its invincibility prevailed. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

All epoch-making revolutionary events have been produced not by the written, but by the spoken word. ~ Adolf Hitler