French Quotes - page 3

Some French socialist said that private property was theft ... I say that private property is a nuisance. (Paul Erdős)
New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St. Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.
Norman Mailer
It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.
G. K. Chesterton
All it takes,ö said Crake, ôis the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and itÆs game over forever.
Margaret Atwood
In France, everybody realized that God exists, and that he is back in the French international team. God is back, there is little left to say.
Zinedine Zidane
Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.
William S. Burroughs
Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i. e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America.
V. S. Pritchett
A logical analysis of reflexive usages in French shows, however, that this simplicity is an illusion and that, so far from helping the foreigner, it is more calculated to bother him.
Edward Sapir
At this very moment, I am suffering - as we say in French, j'ai mal. This event, crucial for me, is nonexistent, even inconceivable for anyone else, for everyone else. Except for God, if that word can have a meaning.
Emil Cioran
The desire of privilege and the taste of equality are the dominant and contradictory passions of the French of all times.
Charles de Gaulle
The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for "entrepreneur." (George W. Bush)
Much like the French (or like ourselves, their apes),Who with strange habit do disguise their shapes;Who loving novels, full of affectation,Receive the manners of each other nation.
Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas
I had no money to buy books, so between classes and work, I haunted the library. I even tutored in French with a sliding scale of payment: twenty dollars for an A, fifteen for a B, ten for a C, five for a D.
Hubert Humphrey
[T]he Famous Rules which the French call, Des Trois Unitez, or, The Three Unities, which ought to be observ'd in every Regular Play; namely, of Time, Place, and Action.
John Dryden
French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.
Peter Medawar
When I am drunk I am at my best. It is the national knack of the French.
Orson Scott Card
French troops arrived in Afghanistan last week, and not a minute too soon. The French are acting as advisers to the Taliban, to teach them how to surrender properly.
Jay Leno
I have nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakians, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. This is a natural inclination... Government should not break up a neighborhood on a numerical basis. As soon as the Government does, the white folks flee.
Jimmy Carter
We do not need French post-structuralism, whose pedantic jargon, clumsy convolutions, and prissy abstractions have spread throughout academe and the arts and are now blighting the most promising minds of the next generation. This is a major crisis if there ever was one, and every sensible person must help bring it to an end.
Camille Paglia
The smouldering eroticism of great European actresses like Jeanne Moreau demonstrated to my generations women's archetypal mystery and glamour, completely missing from the totalitarian world-view of the misogynist Foucault. For me, the big French D is not Derrida, but Deneuve.
Camille Paglia
The followers of Derrida are pathetic, snuffling in French pockets for bits of pieces of a deconstructive method already massively and coherently presented and with a mature sense of the sacred in Buddhism and Hinduism. (Camille Paglia)
If a girl gets sexual pleasure from riding a horse, does the horse suffer? If not, who cares? If you French kiss your dog and he or she thinks it's great, is it wrong? We believe all exploitation and abuse is wrong. If it isn't exploitation and abuse, it may not be wrong.
Ingrid Newkirk
The French people recognize the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul. The first day of every month is to be dedicated to the eternal.
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just
An old sergeant said, if you want to get to France in a hurry, then join the ambulance service, the French are big for ambulance service.
Frank Buckles
To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.
Oscar Wilde