France Quotes - page 41
First, is the danger of futility: the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills - against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant Reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. "Give me a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the world." These men moved the world, and so can we all.
Robert F. Kennedy
Recently, John and I got to go to Selma and perform "Glory” on the same bridge that Dr. King and the people of the civil rights movement marched on 50 years ago. This bridge was once a landmark of a divided nation, but now is a symbol for change. The spirit of this bridge transcends race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and social status. The spirit of this bridge connects the kid from the South Side of Chicago, dreaming of a better life, to those in France standing up for their freedom of expression, to the people in Hong Kong protesting for democracy. This bridge was built on hope, welded with compassion, and elevated by love for all human beings.
Common (rapper)
What are we, weak and blind human beings! And what is that flickering light we call Reason? When we have calculated all the probabilities, questioned history, satisfied every doubt and special interest, we may still embrace only a deceptive shadow rather than the truth. What decree has He pronounced on the king, on his dynasty, on his family, on France, and on Europe? Where and when will the troubles end, and by how many misfortunes must we purchase our tranquillity? Is it to build that He has overthrown, or are our hardships to last forever? Alas! A dark cloud hides the future and no eye can penetrate its shadows.
Joseph de Maistre
It was not merely a question whether the Bourbon family, which had already given so many benefits to France, and among them, that best of all benefits, peace, should continue to reign in France, but whether tyranny and despotism should again reign over the independent nations of the continent? Whether as applied to this country, we should enjoy the happy state that we had bought with our blood after a long struggle, or whether we should once more revert to that artificial system which, during that struggle, we were compelled to maintain? Upon these points there could exist only one feeling, and his lordship trusted that Providence would ordain only one result.
Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh
If France is beaten in a struggle of life and death, beaten to her knees, loses her position as a great power, becomes subordinate to the will and power of one greater than herself-consequences which I do not anticipate, because I am sure that France has the power to defend herself with all the energy and ability and patriotism which she has shown so often-still, if that were to happen and if Belgium fell under the same dominating influence, and then Holland, and then Denmark, then would not Mr. William Gladstone's words come true, that just opposite to us there would be a common interest against the unmeasured aggrandizement of any power?
Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon
For many years we have had a long-standing friendship with France. I remember well the feeling in the House and my own feeling-for I spoke on the subject, I think, when the late Government made their agreement with France-the warm and cordial feeling resulting from the fact that these two nations, who had had perpetual differences in the past, had cleared these differences away; I remember saying, I think, that it seemed to me that some benign influence had been at work to produce the cordial atmosphere that had made that possible. But how far that friendship entails obligation-it has been a friendship between the nations and ratified by the nations-how far that entails an obligation, let every man look into his own heart, and his own feelings, and construe the extent of the obligation for himself.
Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon
...But no matter how enamoured one may be with Postmodernist instability of meanings and signification slippage, absolutely nothing can make spinozisme as employed in Diderot's Promenade and the Encyclopédie, or in High Enlightenment literature, compatible with Revelation, divine providence, religious authority, theism, mysticism, fideism, eclecticism, moral relativism, Aristotelian substances, Platonic ideals, Prisca theologia (natural religion), Cartesian dualism, Lockean dualism based on supra rationem, double truth, fixity of species, Epicurean swerves, La Mettrie's materialism, or skepticism. ‘Spinozists' a term already in very wide use, in Britain, Germany, France, and Italy, as well as Holland well before 1700, and ‘spinozisme' as used in eighteenth-century France, can never mean, or ever be blended with, any of these trends. It may not always be a rigorous philosophical-theological category.
Baruch Spinoza