How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?
Charles de Gaulle
Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.
The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
No nation has friends only interests.
The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.
Greatness is a road leading towards the unknown.
France has lost the battle but she has not lost the war.
Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.
Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so.
Old age is a shipwreck.
I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French.
In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
Faced with crisis, the man of character falls back on himself. He imposes his own stamp of action, takes responsibility for it, makes it his own.
Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.
Treaties are like roses and young girls. They last while they last.
You start out giving your hat, then you give your coat, then your shirt, then your skin and finally your soul.
I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.
In politics it is necessary either to betray one's country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.
When I am right, I get angry. Churchill gets angry when he is wrong. We are angry at each other much of the time.
There can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt.
France cannot be France without greatness.
The sword is the axis of the world and its power is absolute.
You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless.
It is not tolerable, it is not possible, that from so much death, so much sacrifice and ruin, so much heroism, a greater and better humanity shall not emerge.
Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.
The leader must aim high, see big, judge widely, thus setting himself apart form the ordinary people who debate in narrow confines.
Deliberation is the work of many men. Action, of one alone.
One does not arrest Voltaire.
The great leaders have always stage-managed their effects.
Only peril can bring the French together. One can't impose unity out of the blue on a country that has 265 different kinds of cheese.
Diplomats are useful only in fair weather. As soon as it rains they drown in every drop.
For glory gives herself only to those who have always dreamed of her.
The true statesman is the one who is willing to take risks.
When I want to know what France thinks, I ask myself.
China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese.
A true leader always keeps an element of surprise up his sleeve, which others cannot grasp but which keeps his public excited and breathless.
I was France.
To govern is always to choose among disadvantages.
In the tumult of men and events, solitude was my temptation; now it is my friend. What other satisfaction can be sought once you have confronted History?
Never relinquish the initiative.
No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.
Authority doesn't work without prestige, or prestige without distance.
I have heard your views. They do not harmonize with mine. The decision is taken unanimously.
Once upon a time there was an old country, wrapped up in habit and caution. We have to transform our old France into a new country and marry it to its time.
You'll live. Only the best get killed.
As an adolescent I was convinced that France would have to go through gigantic trials, that the interest of life consisted in one day rendering her some signal service and that I would have the occasion to do so.
Hearing Mass is the ceremony I most favor during my travels. Church is the only place where someone speaks to me and I do not have to answer back.
I have against me the bourgeois, the military and the diplomats, and for me, only the people who take the Metro.
