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Charles De Gaulle Quotes

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"I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless quagmire, however much you spend in men and money."

"How can you be expected to govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?"
History

"Old age is a shipwreck."
Age

"I might have had trouble saving France in 1946-I didn't have television then."

"You'll live. Only the best get killed."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I grew up to always respect authority and respect those in charge."

"You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless."

"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."

"Silence is the ultimate weapon of power."

"Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians."

"China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese."

"How can one conceive of a one-party system in a country that has over two hundred varieties of cheese?"

"Authority doesn't work without prestige, or prestige without distance."

"How can anyone govern a nation that has 246 different kinds of cheese?"

"Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word."

"When I am right, I get angry. Churchill gets angry when he is wrong. We are angry at each other much of the time."

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