Top 100 Charles De Gaulle Quotes
#1. The desire of privilege and the taste of equality are the dominant and contradictory passions of the French of all times.
Charles De Gaulle
#4. 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.
Charles De Gaulle
#5. Today we are crushed by the sheer weight of the mechanized forces hurled against us, but we can still look to the future in which even greater mechanized forces will bring us victory. Therein lies the destiny of the world.
Charles De Gaulle
#7. How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?
Charles De Gaulle
#10. Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so.
Charles De Gaulle
#12. Yes, it is Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, it is Europe, it is the whole of Europe, that will decide the fate of the world.
Charles De Gaulle
#14. A true leader always keeps an element of surprise up his sleeve, which others cannot grasp but which keeps his public excited and breathless.
Charles De Gaulle
#15. In war, the policy of least exertion always risks being paid for dearly.
Charles De Gaulle
#16. There can be no other criterion, no other standard than gold. Yes, gold which never changes, which can be shaped into ingots, bars, coins, which has no nationality and which is eternally and universally accepted as the unalterable fiduciary value par excellence.
Charles De Gaulle
#17. You may be sure that the Americans will commit all the stupidities they can think of, plus some that are beyond imagination.
Charles De Gaulle
#18. I have against me the bourgeois, the military and the diplomats, and for me, only the people who take the Metro.
Charles De Gaulle
#22. I am a man who belongs to nobody and who belongs to everybody.
Charles De Gaulle
#23. In the tumult of great events, solitude was what I hoped for. Now it is what I love. How is it possible to be contented with anything else when one has come face to face with history?
Charles De Gaulle
#24. Why do you think that at 67 I would start a career as a dictator ?
Charles De Gaulle
#25. Belgium is a country invented by the British to annoy the French.
Charles De Gaulle
#26. The sword is the axis of the world and grandeur cannot be divided.
Charles De Gaulle
#30. It so happens that the world is undergoing a transformation to which no change that has yet occurred can be compared, either in scope or in rapidity.
Charles De Gaulle
#31. No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.
Charles De Gaulle
#33. The perfection preached in the gospels never yet built an empire. Every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning.
Charles De Gaulle
#34. There can be no prestige without mystery, for familiarity breeds contempt.
Charles De Gaulle
#36. Difficulty attracts the characterful man, for it is by grasping it that he fulfils himself.
Charles De Gaulle
#38. For all of us Frenchmen, the guiding rule of our epoch is to be faithful to France.
Charles De Gaulle
#39. 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.
Charles De Gaulle
#40. Old France, weighed down with history, prostrated by wars and revolutions, endlessly vacillating from greatness to decline, but revived, century after century, by the genius of renewal!
Charles De Gaulle
#42. You start out giving your hat, then you give your coat, then your shirt, then your skin and finally your soul.
Charles De Gaulle
#43. Politics, when it is an art and a service, not an exploitation, is about acting for an ideal through realities.
Charles De Gaulle
#44. It will not be any European statesman who will unite Europe: Europe will be united by the Chinese.
Charles De Gaulle
#48. Adversity attracts the man of character. He seeks out the bitter joy of responsibility.
Charles De Gaulle
#50. Always choose the most difficult way, there you will not meet competitors.
Charles De Gaulle
#51. In politics it is necessary either to betray one's country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.
Charles De Gaulle
#53. I have heard your views. They do not harmonize with mine. The decision is taken unanimously.
Charles De Gaulle
#54. Every Frenchman wants to enjoy one or more privileges; that's the way he shows his passion for equality
Charles De Gaulle
#55. In order to be the master, the politician poses as the servant.
Charles De Gaulle
#57. History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads.
Charles De Gaulle
#60. My dear and old country, here we are once again together faced with a heavy trial.
Charles De Gaulle
#61. The leader must aim high, see big, judge widely, thus setting himself apart form the ordinary people who debate in narrow confines.
Charles De Gaulle
#62. The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.
Charles De Gaulle
#63. 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.
Charles De Gaulle
#64. A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities.
Charles De Gaulle
#65. Leaders of men are later remembered less for the usefulness of what they have achieved than for the sweep of their endeavors.
Charles De Gaulle
#66. Difficulty attracts the man of character because it is in embracing it that he realizes himself
Charles De Gaulle
#67. I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
Charles De Gaulle
#68. 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.
Charles De Gaulle
#72. How can one conceive of a one-party system in a country that has over two hundred varieties of cheese?
Charles De Gaulle
#73. France was built with swords. The fleur-de-lis, symbol of national unity, is only the image of a spear with three pikes.
Charles De Gaulle
#75. I always thought I was Jeanne d'Arc and Bonaparte. How little one knows oneself.
Charles De Gaulle
#76. 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?
Charles De Gaulle
#77. 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.
Charles De Gaulle
#81. Victory often goes to the army that makes the least mistakes, not the most brilliant plans.
Charles De Gaulle
#82. At the root of our civilization, there is the freedom of each person of thought, of belief, of opinion, of work, of leisure.
Charles De Gaulle
#83. 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.
Charles De Gaulle
#84. Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished. Tomorrow, as today, I will speak on Radio London.
Charles De Gaulle
#86. Deliberation is a function of the many; action is the function of one.
Charles De Gaulle
#87. You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless.
Charles De Gaulle
#90. Nothing builds authority up like silence, splendor of the strong and shelter of the weak.
Charles De Gaulle
#91. I grew up to always respect authority and respect those in charge.
Charles De Gaulle
#94. One must speak little. In action one must say nothing. The chief is the one who does not speak.
Charles De Gaulle
#96. 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.
Charles De Gaulle
#97. When I am right, I get angry. Churchill gets angry when he is wrong. We are angry at each other much of the time.
Charles De Gaulle
#98. No, I'm not talking about the Russians; I mean the Germans. In spite of everything, to have pushed so far!
Charles De Gaulle
#99. Always choose the hardest way, on it you will not find opponents
Charles De Gaulle
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