French Quotes

The best and fastest way to learn a sport is to watch and imitate a champion.

Well, a special screening was set up for government officials, so they didn't have to see the experience of going to see the film. They certainly aren't going to the projects to see for themselves the situation.

We made it known that we were trying to show the reality of France. People think of Paris as the city of love or the city of light, but where you got love you got hate, where you got light you got darkness.

Like anywhere, we had to make people understand that we were there with good intentions, and that we were there with respect. We started making contacts with the people in the neighborhood three months before shooting began, so that everyone involved was comfortable.

It's good that they've seen it, but how can I be satisfied after working for two years making a film which I hope will make a difference, when the government sees the film and does nothing about it?

In France they spend six months training policemen, then they give them a gun and put them on the streets, and I don't know that that's enough. The film's not against the police - although I think that if someone wants to be a cop there's got to be a problem.

I'm not a politician; I'm lucky to be a filmmaker and to be able to express myself through the films I make.

I have a hard enough time speaking for myself - I don't pretend I can be a spokesman for anybody. I have no interest in playing that role.

Hood films now are made by studios and have nothing to do with the reality they supposedly represent.

HATE, even if it's making money. is an underground movie, that's how it was made. It's a film about police brutality in the largest sense, it's about the whole of society and not just about the hood.

Many people think that virtue consists of severity towards others.

If we are to abolish the death penalty, I should like to see the first step taken by my friends the murderers.

I gather from a lawyer that there was a rehearsal yesterday. We haven't a hope. I know the presiding judge too: I've had the misfortune to sleep with his wife. He was specially picked.

We can invent only with memory.

Uncertainty is the worst of all evils until the moment when reality makes us regret uncertainty.

Love is the most terrible, and also the most generous of the passions; it is the only one which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.

Happiness is composed of misfortunes avoided.

Every man has three characters - that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has.

If men knew all that women think, they would be twenty times more audacious.

The more things change, the more they are the same.

Love in marriage should be the accomplishment of a beautiful dream, and not, as it too often is, the end.

Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns; I am thankful that thorns have roses.

We too, through lack of knowledge and of sufficiently mature reflection, mistook the visible outward appearance of the phenomenon for the phenomenon itself.

This led me to understand that trade unionism, the instrument of working-class liberation and of social change could, and indeed should, be also an instrument of industrial progress.

This disaster did not force us to abandon our ideal; on the contrary, from the very first months of the conflict, it led us to define precisely the conditions for its realization.

The working classes were becoming more and more sharply aware of the complex causes of international malaise.

The trade unions, far from being content with these declarations, established international liaisons and supported every policy based on pacification and understanding.

On completion of my military service, I went back to the factory and to the trade union.

My parents, and especially my mother, encouraged by the director of the local school which I was attending, wanted in spite of everything to send me to a National School of Arts and Crafts so that I could later become an engineer.

In the report made on behalf of the C.G.T. we affirmed that the Peace Treaty should, in accordance with the spirit of workers' organizations, lay the first foundations of the United States of Europe.