Charles De Gaulle Quotes

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

Diplomats are useful only in fair weather. As soon as it rains they drown in every drop.

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

Nothing great will ever be achieved without great men, and men are great only if they are determined to be so.

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.

In politics it is necessary either to betray one's country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.

Old age is a shipwreck.

You'll live. Only the best get killed.

I respect only those who resist me, but I cannot tolerate them.

France has lost the battle but she has not lost the war.

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?

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

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

For glory gives herself only to those who have always dreamed of her.

China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese.

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.

A true leader always keeps an element of surprise up his sleeve, which others cannot grasp but which keeps his public excited and breathless.

Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.

I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

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.

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.

Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.

The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.