Top 61 French History Quotes
#1. Her name was a joke, she said, like Karen Cutter's family nick-naming her Cookie, or poor Marie Antoinette Jones, whose parents had liked the sound of the name but who were a tad weak in French history.
Miriam N. Kotzin
#2. I learned French in Tunis, along with Arabic. I also learned French history. I knew the entire history of the kings of France. And I was fascinated by Versailles.
Azzedine Alaia
#3. When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#4. Mitterrand had a sense for symbols, and he was the first Socialist president since 1958. He wanted to show that there is historical continuity, a connection with the great figures of French history.
Francois Hollande
#5. There must be no repercussions to this," says Marie Antoinette. Her quiet voice slides through the room like the whisper of a steel blade.
Meghan Masterson
#6. Throughout history
even a hundred years ago, even fifty
it was discontent that was considered the threat to society, the defiance of natural law, the danger that had to be exterminated at all costs. Now it's contentment,
Tana French
#7. Obviously, I would have been happier if Canada had not been conquered in the past by the English, if this part of North America had remained French, but you can't rewrite history.
Jean Chretien
#8. The headmistress was an able instructress in French and history and we learned with her as fast as fear could teach us.
Cyril Connolly
#9. Many had suspected that the political disasters of the past few years had a hidden cause. The bloodiness of the French mob rule was something unnatural, with a pitiless and inhuman progression that had never been seen before.
Mike Jay
#10. 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
#11. I was deeply interested in the little family history which he detailed to me with all that candor which a Frenchman indulges whenever mere self is the theme.
Edgar Allan Poe
#12. I turn away from the smell of death, pressing my lavender scented handkerchief as tight as I can against my nose.
Meghan Masterson
#13. Who can doubt that between the English and the French, between the Scotch and the Irish, there are differences of character which have profoundly affected and still affect the course of history?
Goldwin Smith
#14. In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?
Manuel Puig
#15. If you look back at the history of creativity in clothes - the French Revolution, the First World War and the Second World War - they have all been creative reinventions, the moment new forms of luxury come into play.
Christian Lacroix
#16. I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that's quickly giving way to modern technology.
Mary Kubica
#17. The French revolution, he concluded, had not produced any new principles of truths, merely a mass of examples of how things could go wrong.
Mike Jay
#18. The people of Texas are rightly proud of their own, just like the French and the Italians, but visiting artists have often been given a shot in the history of art.
Clifford Ross
#19. I think Spain will always remain inspirational, and I think French cuisine will continue to be very French and yet very relevant with its time and keep evolving. But the last thing you want for it is to become too trendy and confusing. It has too much history.
Daniel Boulud
#20. In all their wars against the French they [the Americans] never showed such conduct, attention and perseverance as they do now.
Thomas Gage
#21. History is a Rorschach test, people. What you see when you look at it tells you as much about yourself as it does about the past.
Jennifer Donnelly
#22. The French Revolution, by claiming to build history on the principle of absolute purity,
inaugurates modern times simultaneously with the era of formal morality.
Albert Camus
#23. It is not the business of a Queen to be human.
Antal Szerb
#24. To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.
Leslie Fiedler
#25. It's finally happened; scientists claim to have discovered the very first person in history who doesn't like french fries.
Just imagine the implications!
Graham Parke
#26. Anything that keeps old words in circulation is to be treasured, the French revolution be damned.
Joseph Bottum
#27. You go to school, you study about the Germans and the French, but not about your own race. I hope the time will come when you study black history too.
Booker T. Washington
#28. We had a great friendship, good sex, a shared passion for the dinosaur room at the Museum of Natural History and Haagen-Daz French Vanilla ice cream. But love is more than the sum of its parts, isn't it?
Lisa Unger
#29. The Uberlingen Chief of Police Jakob Graf, was severely wounded in this explosion. It has now become questionable as to whether the weapons he collected were for the Gestapo or the invading French troops.
Hank Bracker
#30. If history is written by the victors, conspiracy theory is typically written by the losers, and there were few greater losers in the revolution than the French church and especially the Jesuits.
Mike Jay
#31. If you spent time thinking about the future, you wouldn't be a true adventurer. An adventure is something that happens from one moment to the next; in which there is no yesterday and no tomorrow. Everything else is just petty bourgeois.
Antal Szerb
#32. The great themes of Canadian history are as follows: Keeping the Americans out, keeping the French in, and trying to get the Natives to somehow disappear.
Will Ferguson
#33. I can speak French, understand Gaelic and know my history. That's the training music has given me.
Eddi Reader
#34. There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#35. Don't know much about history, don't know much biology, don't know much about a science book, don't know much about the French I took.
Sam Cooke
#36. Jean-Marie Le Pen is a holocaust denier who was convicted and fined for dismissing Nazi concentration camps as a, quote, "Detail in History." But he kept running this anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, populist unapologetic xenophobic far right party in French politics.
Rachel Maddow
#37. If I can't find a project that I'm really interested in, I'll just go back to college where I've been studying art history and French. I'm also going to study English and philosophy - the whole curriculum!
Emmy Rossum
#38. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.
Octavio Paz
#39. Last summer I picked up a yellow scrap of newspaper and read of a Biloxi election in 1948, and in it I caught the smell of history more pungently than from the metal marker telling of the French and Spanish two hundred years ago and the Yankees one hundred years ago. 1948. What a faroff time.
Walker Percy
#40. Here's the irony in what I do: When I go out to eat, I like classic French food. I like amazing Japanese food that has such a history that it goes back hundreds of years. And I also like really innovative food as well.
Grant Achatz
#41. My deep relations with fashion started in Paris in 1980s, when I was appointed head of The Fashion History course at French Esmod fashion school, the biggest and the best in those years in Paris.
Alexander Vassiliev
#42. Despite history, despite English, despite the noteworthies, and a little bit also despite ourselves, alas!, the Quebecois people have stayed French. I had violently returned. This people had no need of directives to affirm its French pride in the face of the whole world
Pierre Bourgault
#43. In your opinion, where do private and political life, personal history and History meet? You know the answer, Maya. You say it unhesitatingly - in art and literature.
Abdourahman A. Waberi
#44. A revolution in itself is not a blessing. The revolution accomplished by the French people is, indeed, a wonderful event - the most striking, in my opinion, in history; but it may lead to events which will make it a mighty evil.
John C. Calhoun
#45. In the history of humanity, there have been many languages, including French, that have served as universal languages: Latin, Chinese, Arabic, and more. Yet none of them ever ruled the world the way English does today.
Minae Mizumura
#46. The Vietnamese see their history as an unending series of struggles of resistance to aggression, by the Chinese, the Mongols, the Japanese, the French, and now the Americans.
Noam Chomsky
#48. French was assigned to sculpt allegorical figures of the continents. His America, from 1907, is one of the most concise depictions of our history I've ever seen: a European stepping on a Mayan head.
Sarah Vowell
#49. Whoever heard of such a mixture of languages in one army, since there were French, Flemings, Frisians, Gauls, Sayonards, Lotharingians, Allemani, Bavarians, Normans, English, Scots, Aquitanians, Italians, Danes, Apulians, Iberians, Bretons, Greeks and Armenians.
Fulcher Of Chartres
#50. What are the objects of an useful American education? classical knowlege, modern languages & chiefly French, Spanish, & Italian; Mathematics; Natural philosophy; Natural History; Civil History; Ethics.
Thomas Jefferson
#51. My History of the Jesuits is in four volumes ... This society has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, or Napoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally.
John Adams
#52. Written and directed by French showman Georges Melies, 'Le Voyage' features one of the most indelible images in cinema history: the wounded Man in the Moon bleeding like a particularly runny Brie, grimacing in pain with a space capsule protruding from his right eye.
Kage Baker
#53. She turned her painted blue eyes toward the assistant and said something in French before she left.
Nancy B. Brewer
#54. the thing we call French culture may be due to the fact that French children can play, surrounded by the things of the past, palaces of bygone kings, statues, remembrances of history.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#55. The French, I think, in general, are strangely prolix in their natural history.
Gilbert White
#56. We are a big country, with lots of advantages and history. We are proud to be French. We have to call on patriotism at this time ... to ask for an effort in the battle against debt.
Francois Hollande
#57. The French by their nature had a permanent hunger for sensation. This was even more true of the eighteenth century, of which that considerable expert Victor du Bled remarked that no other age was ever so bored.
Antal Szerb
#58. Many in America, as one social historian wrote, 'believed implicitly that New York's social leaders went to bed in full evening dress, brushed their teeth in vintage champagne, married their daughters without exception to shady French counts, and arrayed their poodle dogs in diamond tiaras.' ...
Greg King
#59. There are two miracles in Canadian history. The first is the survival of French Canada, and the second is the survival of Canada.
F. R. Scott
#60. English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.
David Crystal
#61. I had art as a major, along with English, French and History. I had dance, modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry, which I eventually got published.
Sally Kirkland
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