Top 100 Quotes About The French
#1. Dip a slice of bread in batter. That's September: yellow, gold, soft and sticky. Fry the bread. Now you have October: chewier, drier, streaked with browns. The day in question fell somewhere in the middle of the french toast process.
Tom Robbins
#2. In the 1930s, there were so many different conflicts going on between the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Romanians and so on.
Alan Furst
#3. We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.
Douglas Coupland
#4. The French writer Edmond About, who visited Greece in 1832, a dozen years after its independence, reports how peasants struggled with the metric system as it was completely unnatural to them and stuck to Ottoman standards instead.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#5. The French were generous in giving us assistance in corps and army artillery, with its personnel, and we were confident from the start of our superiority over the enemy in guns of all calibers.
Kelly Miller
#7. The word Chivalry is derived from the French cheval, a horse.
Thomas Bulfinch
#8. Peace is the wish of the French of Italy Spain Germany and all the world, and Great Britain alone the cause of preventing its accomplishment, and this not for any point of honour or even interest, but merely lest there should be an example in the modern world of a great powerful Republic.
Charles James Fox
#9. New Orleans may well have been the most liberal Deep South city in 1954 because of its large Creole population, the influence of the French, and its cosmopolitan atmosphere.
Constance Baker Motley
#10. I'd always been extremely fascinated by the French Nuit Blanche, which is a weekend that they have in Paris where they keep all the museums open until dawn. You can go and hang out in Versailles in the middle of the night and watch the sun come up.
Anna Wintour
#11. Edmund Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. Any society, he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which destroys the fabric of its state, must soon be "disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality".
Tony Judt
#12. I told my daughter that terrorists would love to attack Washington, but we, unlike the French, are an ocean away from Syria, that lots of smart people are working very hard to stop the terrorists, and that the terrorists are not very sophisticated.
Dana Milbank
#13. What's foreign one can't always keep quite clear of,
For good things, oft, are not so near;
A German can't endure the French to see or hear of,
Yet drinks their wines with hearty cheer.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#14. The only thing strong about the French Army is their damn body odor.
Dwayne Johnson
#15. In the Middle Ages, everything bad was the work of the devil, everything good, the work of God. Today, the French see everything in reverse and blame the Germans for it.
Jose Rizal
#16. Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.
Willa Cather
#17. I would not go so far as to say that the French trade unions attached greater importance to the struggle for peace than the others did; but they certainly seemed to take it more to heart.
Leon Jouhaux
#18. I must represent France, and I want to be elegant, and I want the French people to be proud of me, you know.
Carla Bruni
#19. The French are nice people. I allow them to sing and to write, and they allow me to do whatever I like.
Cardinal Mazarin
#20. My father-in-law was a pilot. During World War II, he was shot down in a B-17 over Belgium. With the help of the French Resistance, he made his way through Occupied France and back to his base in England.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#21. It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for swans.
Van Wyck Brooks
#22. Why don't they allow professional wrestling at the Olympics? They allow pro basketball players and hockey players. Olympic pro wrestling would be awesome. The team from Mexico could wear those Mr. X masks. The French wrestler could hit his opponent with a baguette. Or perhaps just surrender.
Craig Ferguson
#23. NOMISMA, MEANING 'COIN', was used by both Greeks and Romans. Our own word 'money' derives, via the French monnaie, from the Latin moneta, meaning the mint, where coins are struck. (In early Rome the mint was situated on the Capitoline Hill in the temple of Juno Moneta.)
Norman Davies
#24. Who goes there?" At the same time, the click of guns, as they were lowered into position, was heard. Enjolras replied in a haughty and vibrating tone: - "The French Revolution!
Victor Hugo
#25. That amenity which the French have developed into a great art ... conversation.
Cornelia Otis Skinner
#26. The Istiqlal was powerful, which did not at all coincide with his conception of it, nor with the picture the organization painted of itself: a purely defensive group of selfless martyrs who were willing to brave the brutality of the French in order to bring hope to their suffering countrymen.
Paul Bowles
#27. I don't think it's a low point being in the finals of the French Open, three points away from the victory.
Martina Hingis
#28. We English have no very strong attachment to the soil, we can make ourselves at home in any part of the world, but the French, I think, have an attachment to their country which is almost a physical bond. They're never really at ease when they're out of it.
W. Somerset Maugham
#29. It was 1953, and I was still at school. I'd borrowed a silent French film from the library for my 9.5mm projector. It was by Jean Epstein, and it was awful. So I rang the library and asked if they had anything else. They said they had 'Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution.'
Kevin Brownlow
#30. After World War II it was decided that, in order to prevent the Germans and the French from having another war, it would be better to tie them together into one economic pact so they would invest in each other and have mutual stakes. Until now, that has worked to prevent warfare between the two.
Frans De Waal
#31. She doesn't have to work to blend in because in the French Quarter, all you have to do to blend in is dance with the chaos.
Christopher Rice
#32. To say my day was not going well, would be like saying the French Revolution had been a bit troublesome for Marie Antoinette.
Nichole Chase
#33. People are foolish and bad, especially the French, and are always quickly seduced by power into insanity, and therefore lucky to have any kind of social order whatsoever, but the tougher the better.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#34. The "terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.
Edward Abbey
#35. 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
#36. 18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.
Bill Bryson
#37. If you go back and watch 'The French Connection,' it's been cannibalized so many times. There are certain movies like that, where you see the original and think, 'This isn't so great.' And the reason it isn't so great is because everyone has copied it.
Adam McKay
#38. There is but one Paris and however hard living may be here, and if it became worse and harder even - the French air clears up the brain and does good - a world of good.
Vincent Van Gogh
#39. I'm not going to lie: There are times I play mind tricks on myself, like that the French fries are poison. With desserts, I'll let myself have just one bite, but I'll look like a freak when I'm eating it, like when I did Duncan Hines commercials as a kid, just savoring every morsel.
Fergie
#40. Faced by the actual practice of freedom, the French and American revolutions would be forced to stand by their words.
William S. Burroughs
#41. I like to be in a huis clos, as the French say - in one place. It's something that in general can create a bit of claustrophobia. But for me, claustrophobia becomes almost immediately claustrophilia. I love it!
Bernardo Bertolucci
#42. The English did not come to America from a mere love of adventure, nor to truck with or convert the savages, nor to hold offices under the crown, as the French to a great extent did, but to live in earnest and with freedom.
Henry David Thoreau
#43. Justice has its anger, Monsieur Bishop, and the wrath of justice is an element of progress. No matter what they say, the French Revolution is the greatest advance taken by mankind since the coming of Christ.
Victor Hugo
#44. The fact is that all the important political philosophers and scientists from the great Aristotle on, with the exception of those of the French Enlightenment and Mill, have sided with the powers that be.
Mario Bunge
#45. George W. Bush, the former US president, is reputed to have complained that the problem with the French is that they do not have a word for entrepreneurship in their language.
Ha-Joon Chang
#47. The sentiment of national honor is never more than half extinguished in the French. It takes only a spark to re-kindle it.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#48. Ho joined the French socialist party, the first Vietnamese to be a member of a French political party.
Wilfred Burchett
#49. There is a belief that love has its own justification, that it should be experienced as passionately as possible. The French have a wonderful expression, amour passion, which is the ultimate.
Marilyn Yalom
#50. When you go to watch a baseball game, when you go to watch an NBA game, when you watch an NFL game, when you go to watch movies, the offering that those arenas are doing foodwise is 'all the hot dogs you can eat'; all the French fries you can eat; for $20 you can eat 20 hot dogs.
Jose Andres
#51. Food: Part of the spiritual expression of the French, and I do not believe that they have ever heard of calories.
Beverley Baxter
#52. Everything about her room betokened wealth; but she had put away the French novels, and had placed a Bible on a little table, not quite hidden, behind her own seat.
Anthony Trollope
#53. Louise de Keroualle, being a Frenchwoman from the French court, was feared by most Englishmen for how she might influence their king, and that fear quickly turned to hatred.
Susan Holloway Scott
#54. The French do some things better, like spanking for instance.
Chloe Thurlow
#55. Everything is entertainment; criticism is now entertainment and it seems that the French directors have woken up one day and suddenly realised that they were not backed up any more.
Wim Wenders
#56. The Russians were unparalleled in their suffering, the English in their reserve, the Americans in their love of life, the Italians in their love of Christ, and the French in their hope of love.
Paullina Simons
#57. Cinco de Mayo is an important day. The Mexicans had to defend themselves from the French. It is historically significant, but it is not Mexican Independence Day.
Kuno Becker
#58. I do love this people [the French] with all my heart, and think that with a better religion and a better form of government and their present governors their condition and country would be most enviable.
Thomas Jefferson
#59. (optimisme itself was a word that first entered the French language in the eighteenth century).
Kenan Malik
#60. I have had some problems because the French don't like people to have success, they don't like the number one.
Alain Prost
#61. You know, the French remind me a little bit of an aging actress of the 1940s who was still trying to dine out on her looks but doesn't have the face for it
John McCain
#62. [Trading] With the French one had to be especially careful. French oarswomen were known to take men aside, point to whatever they wanted, and then peel off their own shirts. It took great presence of mind to bargain with a half-naked Frenchwoman.
Stefan Kieszling
#63. There is something in the quality of the French mind to which I have always felt a reluctant kinship. They are the only people I know who can leap into an enormous vocabulary of words and beat them up with the wings of their spirit into a fine hysterical eloquence.
Corra May Harris
#64. I hate the French because they are all slaves and wear wooden shoes.
Oliver Goldsmith
#65. I was a French Quarter rat from the moment I could get on a bus by myself and go to the French Quarter. I played music most of my early life and it just seemed that to entertain people was a really good thing to do.
John Larroquette
#66. You have witchcraft in your lips, there is more eloquence in a sugar touch of them than in the tongues of the French council; and they should
sooner persuade Harry of England than a general petition of monarchs.
William Shakespeare
#67. Summertime in the french countryside is the smell of ripening fig trees and the taste of wild blackberries.
Vicki Archer
#68. The Irish are hearty, the Scotch plausible, the French polite, the Germans good-natured, the Italians courtly, the Spaniards reserved and decorous - the English alone seem to exist in taking and giving offense.
William Hazlitt
#69. The French got enough from the Germans to save them from starvation; but many a woman sold herself for a loaf or a chunk of sausage.
Ernst Toller
#70. My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.
Julius Evola
#71. So why, after prior successes, did Obama's race/class/gender attack finally sputter out like the French at Waterloo?
Victor Davis Hanson
#72. My experience of coming out was very much centered around the bar scene. And what happened for me is that when I turned 18 and was old enough to get into certain gay bars in the French Quarter, I became a regular customer.
Christopher Rice
#73. Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off.
Yuval Noah Harari
#74. A little of everything and nothing thoroughly, after the French fashion.
Michel De Montaigne
#75. Some of the French surrealists at the beginning of the war had come over to New York and they brought out this magazine. It was a big, glossy magazine full of surrealist things.
Kenneth Koch
#76. I felt like putting a bullet between the
eyes of every Panda that wouldn't screw to save its
species. I wanted to open the dump valves on oil tankers
and smother all the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted
to breathe smoke.
Chuck Palahniuk
#77. I know where I'm going and I have told the French. I am sure if hope is there, we will be able to put France back on its feet ... to live better in five years than we do today.
Francois Hollande
#78. Most, actually, German actors have like some speaking of French. So, the French wasn't the problem. But, I was having a problem with them doing my dialogue in English. And it wasn't a matter of fluency.
Quentin Tarantino
#79. Notwithstanding the prevalent notion that the French poets are the sympathetic heirs of classic culture, it appears to me that they are not so imbued with the true classic spirit, art, and mythology as some of our English poets, notably Keats and Shelley.
William Shakespeare
#80. Savannah is amazing with the town squares and the hanging moss and the French Colonial houses. It's brutally romantic.
David Morrissey
#81. After the French Revolution, it was not the treason of the king that was in question; it was the existence of the king. You have to be very careful when you judge and execute somebody for being a symbol.
Adam Michnik
#82. Many of the French follow a Trade with the Indians, living very conveniently for that Interest.
John Lawson
#83. Although as an individual Gao had readily denounced the Chinese authorities for the events of 4 June in the French and Italian media, he refused to compromise his integrity as a writer. His stance angered both political sides.
Gao Xingjian
#84. Since the French Revolution Englishmen are all intermeasurable one by another, certainly a happy state of agreement to which I forone do not agree.
William Blake
#85. The Russians are very much more up and down than the French.
Carine Roitfeld
#86. I never thought I could win the French Open.
Li Na
#87. I believe neither the French nor the Dutch really rejected the constitutional treaty.
Jean-Claude Juncker
#88. Greenwich got the nod because 72 per cent of the world's commerce depended on British sea-charts - and because it annoyed the French intensely.
Richard Happer
#89. To the French, [le plaisir] is a part of the general fearless and joyful contact with life.
Edith Wharton
#90. How do I speak Spanish? Not too well. Paz taught me a few words that, if people weren't nice to me, I could tell them a few things. I got to study with [chef] Thomas Keller, who we all love as a guy and Jim had a relationship with him at [his restaurant] the French Laundry.
Adam Sandler
#91. Some write that I'm a genius, others say that I'm disrespectful towards their country ... If you remember in 1993 I squatted to tie my shoe during the French national anthem.
Hristo Stoichkov
#92. Although the French were very friendly and helpful. On one location we were to film at the top of the Eiffel Tower but we couldn't, as it was so misty with four inches of snow on the ground. We couldn't see a thing but we finally got it done.
Lalla Ward
#93. I returned to London in the spring of 1926 for the General Strike. It was the topic of Paris. The French, exultant as always at the discomfiture of their former friends, and transposing into their own precise terms our mistier notions from across the Channel, foretold revolution and civil
Evelyn Waugh
#94. There is of course one thing that the French love more than anything else: a revolution. They literally cannot get enough.
@Queen_UK
#95. In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry.
Bertrand Russell
#96. Davy's work in Bristol came under attack by conservative politicians, including the famous Irish MP Edmund Burke, who accused the gas experiments of promoting not only atheism but the French Revolution.
Mark Kurlansky
#97. I remember when Lindbergh arrived in Paris, I was one of the first persons to know about his landing, because as the French people know that I was born in St. Louis, thinking I would be very proud to announce it to the public, they gave me the news first. I was then starring in the 'Folies Bergere.'
Josephine Baker
#98. The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.
Raymond Chandler
#99. I was chef to the French Presidents between '56 and '59, finished with de Gaulle, and during de Gaulle I remember serving Eisenhower, Nehru, Tito, Macmillan; those were the heads of state at the time. I never saw anyone. No one would ever, ever, ever come to the kitchen. You couldn't even see them.
Jacques Pepin
#100. My look is a cocktail. I'm not as nicely turned out as the french, but I don't care like the English.
Jane Birkin
