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Georges Clemenceau
84 quotes
“The enemy is at the gates of the city. The day is perhaps not far off when our breasts will be the last defence for our country. We are the children of the Revolution. Let us take inspiration from our fathers of 1792, and, like them, we will conquer.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1870 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Poster (23 September 1870) during the Franco-Prussian War, quoted in David Robin Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 38
“Bismarck is a dangerous enemy, but even more dangerous perhaps as a friend: he showed us Tunis, placing us in conflict with England, and is now negotiating with us over the Congo.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Chamber of Deputies (27 November 1884), quoted in David Robin Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 90
“Whether we like it or not, whether it pleases us or shocks us, the French Revolution is a bloc ... a bloc from which nothing can be separated, because historical truth does not permit it. ... the Revolution is not finished, it is still continuing, we are actors in it, the same men are still in conflict with the same enemies. The struggle will go on, until the final day of victory, and until that day we will not allow you to throw mud at the Revolution.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1891 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Chamber of Deputies (29 January 1891), quoted in David Robin Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 119
“It was I who gave the title "J'accuse" to Zola's letter.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1902 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter (19 June 1902), in which he claims to have chosen the headline title for Émile Zola's famous open letter on the Dreyfus affair, as quoted in Clemenceau (1974) by D. R. Watson, and Brewer's Famous Quotations : 500…
“No, my friend, Germany will not declare war on us [at this moment]. But in my opinion the European situation is such that a great armed conflict is inevitable at some time which I cannot foresee, and our duty is to prepare for the worst.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1906 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Georg Brandes (9 January 1906), quoted in David Robin Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), pp. 220-221
“I think war is inevitable. We must do nothing to provoke it, but we must be ready for it; helped by Russia and England, doubtless by Spain also and perhaps by Italy as well, we may be able to win. In any case it will be a life and death affair: if we are beaten we will be crushed.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1908 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Georges Louis (28 July 1908), quoted in David Robin Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 221
“The difficulty between us and Germany is this: that Germany believes that the logic of her victory means domination, while we do not believe that the logic of our defeat is serfdom [vassalité].”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1912 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Senate (10 February 1912), quoted in David Robin Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 220
“[If the Socialists want peace] so do I, but it is not by bleating of peace that we can silence Prussian militarism. A moment ago M. Constant complained of my silence about foreign policy. My foreign policy and my domestic policy are all one. Internal policy, I wage war; foreign policy, I still wage war; I still wage war. Russia betrays us; I continue the war: unfortunate Rumania is forced to capitulate; I continue the war, and I will continue it down to the last quarter of an hour.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Chamber of Deputies (8 March 1918), quoted in David Robin Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 289–290
“The Germans may take Paris, but that will not prevent me from going on with the war. We will fight on the Loire, we will fight on the Garronne, we will fight even in the Pyrenees. And if at last we are driven off the Pyrenees, we will continue the war at sea.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Clemenceau and the Third Republic (1946) by John Hampden Jackson.
“[Clemenceau] said that the Rhine was a natural boundary of Gaul and Germany and that it ought to be made the German boundary now, the territory between the Rhine and the French frontier being made into an Independent State whose neutrality should be guaranteed by the great powers.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in a letter from the British Ambassador Lord Derby to Arthur Balfour (14 December 1918), quoted in David Robin Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 337
“I should lie if I said that I was at once in agreement with him [President Wilson] on all the points. America is far distant from the frontiers of Germany, as I remarked a little while ago. I have, perhaps, preoccupations which I would not say are foreign to him, but which do not touch him so closely as they touch the man who has seen his country devastated during four years by an enemy who was within several days of Paris.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Chamber of Deputies (29 December 1918), quoted in George Bernard Noble, Policies and Opinions at Paris, 1919 (New York: Macmillan, 1935), p. 89
“War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Statement to Woodrow Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference (12 January 1919), as quoted in The Macmillan Dictionary of Political Quotations (1993) by Lewis D. Eigen and Jonathan Paul Siegel, p. 689
“Mr. Wilson bores me with his Fourteen Points; why, God Almighty has only Ten!”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Hero in America: A Chronicle of Hero-worship (1941) by Dixon Wecter, p. 402
“His poor marksmanship must be taken into account. We have just won the most terrible war in history, yet here is a Frenchman who misses his target 6 out of 7 times at point-blank range. Of course, this fellow must be punished for the careless use of a dangerous weapon and for poor marksmanship. I suggest that he be locked up for eight years, with intensive training in a shooting gallery.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Arguing against seeking the death penalty for the anarchist who had attempted to assassinate him on 19 February 1919, shooting at him seven times and hitting him only once in the chest, as quoted in A Time for Angels : …
“There are only two perfectly useless things in this world. One is an appendix and the other is Poincaré.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Referring to his rival Raymond Poincaré, as quoted in Paris 1919 : Six Months That Changed the World (2003) by Margaret MacMillan, p. 33
“After expending the greatest effort, and suffering the greatest sacrifices in blood in all history, we must not compromise the results of our victory...if the League of Nations cannot buttress its orders with military sanctions we must find this sanction elsewhere...I beg you to understand my state of mind, just as I am trying to understand yours. America is far away and protected by the ocean, England could not be reached by Napoleon himself. You are sheltered, both of you; we are not.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the Paris Peace Conference (27 March 1919), quoted in Anthony Adamthwaite, Grandeur and Misery: France's Bid for Power in Europe 1914-1940 (London: Arnold, 1995), p. 40
“For you a hundred years is a very long time; for us it does not amount to much. I knew men who had seen Napoleon with their own eyes. We have our conception of history and it cannot be the same as yours.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1914 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remarks to Woodrow Wilson (28 March 1919), quoted in Anthony Adamthwaite, Grandeur and Misery: France's Bid for Power in Europe 1914-1940 (London: Arnold, 1995), p. 49
“In fifteen years I will be dead, but if you do me the honour of visiting my tomb, you will be able to say that the Germans have not fulfilled all the clauses of the treaty, and that we are still on the Rhine.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Remarks to Poincaré in Cabinet (25 April 1919), quoted in David Robin Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 352
“We need a barrier behind which, in the years to come, our people can work in security to rebuild its ruins. That barrier is the Rhine. I must take national feelings into account. That does not mean that I am afraid of losing office. I am quite indifferent on that point. But I will not, by giving up the occupation, do something which will break the willpower of our people.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the Paris Peace Conference (June 1919), quoted in David Robin Watson, Georges Clemenceau: A Political Biography (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 352
“Il est plus facile de faire la guerre que la paix.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Discours de Paix" [Speech on Peace] Verdun (20 July 1919)
“I do not know whether war is an interlude in peace, or whether peace is an interlude in war.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Senate (11 October 1919), quoted in George Bernard Noble, Policies and Opinions at Paris, 1919 (New York: Macmillan, 1935), p. 353
“I have come to the conclusion that force is right. Why is this chicken here? (pointing to his plate). Because it was not strong enough to resist those who wanted to kill it. And a very good thing too!”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Frances Stevenson's diary entry (12 December 1919), A. J. P. Taylor (ed.), Lloyd George: A Diary (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p. 192
“Oh, to be seventy again!”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Exclamation to a friend on his 80th birthday (1921) as an attractive young woman passed them while walking down the Champs-Élysées, as quoted in Ego 3 (1938) by James Agate. Similar remarks have also been attributed to …
“La guerre! C’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Soixante Anneés d'Histoire Française (1932) by Georges Suarez
“My son is 22 years old. If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On being told his son had joined the Communist Party, as quoted in Try and Stop Me (1944) by Bennet Cerf
“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Attributed to Clemenceau by Hans Bendix, in "Merry Christmas, America!" The Saturday Review of Literature (1 December 1945), p. 9; this appears to be the earliest reference to such a remark as one by Clemenceau, though …
“All that I know I learned after I was thirty.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in And Madly Teach : A Layman Looks at Public School Education (1949) by Mortimer Brewster Smith, p. 27
“Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Unlawful Concert : An Account of the Presidio Mutiny Case (1970) by Fred Gardner.
“Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Europeans (1984) by Luigi Barzini, p. 225
“There is no passion like that of a functionary for his function.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations (1998) by Connie Robertson, p. 86
“I belonged to the generation that saw the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, and never could I be consoled for that loss. And I here recall, with pardonable pride, that in 1908 I stood up against Germany in the Casablanca crisis, and that the Government of William II, after demanding apologies from us, was forced by my calm resistance to be satisfied with mere arbitration, as in any other dispute.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For the catastrophe of 1914 the Germans are responsible. Only a professional liar would deny this.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]hen at Versailles Brockdorff-Rantzau addressed me in the language of the bearer of a challenge, I was forced to realize that the German revolution was mere window-dressing, and that, with the aggressor of 1914 not a whit cured of his insane folly, we should continue without respite to be subjected, in a new setting, to the same attack from the same enemy.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What after all is this war, prepared, undertaken, and waged by the German people, who flung aside every scruple of conscience to let it loose, hoping for a peace of enslavement under the yoke of a militarism destructive of all human dignity? It is simply the continuance, the recrudescence, of those never-ending acts of violence by which the first savage tribes carried out their depredations with all the resources of barbarism. The means improve with the ages. The ends remain the same.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Peace or war, we are in the midst of a relentless struggle for power. Woe to the weak! Turn your back on the purveyors of soothing syrup!”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The quantum of a hypothetical German civilization would not take us very far, because she is to-day still too close to barbarism.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To ensure the execution of the Treaty [of Versailles] all we lacked later on was a statesman of some strength of purpose.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he keynote of the Treaty of Versailles is the liberation of the peoples, the independence of nationalities, whereas the keynote of the policy of Marshal Foch and M. Poincaré was the occupation of a territory by force of arms against the will of its inhabitants.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What will remain of the greatest effort of the human civilizations for an enlargement of universal civilization I shall not attempt to foresee, after ten years of talk in which victors and vanquished have gone on the same tack to shatter, one by one, every guarantee of success.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anyone who retains as much education as the average boy can pick up in a continuation elementary school can understand that General Foch's chief preoccupations were not concerned with the generalizations of universal justice embodied in war or peace. Had he opened the annals of our past at whatsoever page he might choose, he would have found that our life throughout history, bandied about between battles and truces in the unending oscillation of all things, is at any moment but preparing for or stabilizing a new transient form of society for the momentary advantage of the strongest.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea of force is deeply rooted in man, as in the whole universe. Law is controlled and ordered force.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bismarck went so far as to boast of a forgery. The Ems telegram was a crime of no less magnitude than the outrage on Belgium. The cynicism of the scrap of paper will be counted against Germany as long as human history lasts. That stain, like Lady Macbeth's, can never be effaced.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A peace of justice, a Europe founded upon right, the creator of independent states whose military power is augmented by all the moral energies generated by the necessity for asserting themselves in all spheres of international life—will not this create a body of forces superior to anything that could come from a powerfully organized frontier?”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Always watching their opportunity to hit back in every sphere, our defeated enemies demand reckonings from their conquerors, who fear nothing so much as not to give them complete satisfaction. I set down this fact in order to clear my own conscience, and especially because it is high time for the French nation to take a firmer grip on itself and to substitute a policy of determination for this confusion born of timidity, through which the threat of a compact mass of barbarism is kept hanging over our heads.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And if our recent victory had merely been one of territorial conquests that were fated to call us out to the battlefield again to meet attempts to take revenge for our revenge, our success of the moment would have been as fruitless as every success before it. What was more to be desired in the interests of Europe striving for civilization was a victor capable of controlling himself so as to replace armed might by right in the fluid equilibrium of a peace capable of enduring.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The real task—and an absolutely new one—was the attempt to make definitely a Europe founded on right. In spite of some people's lack of understanding, to have attempted this will be the glory of the Treaty of Versailles. It is for future Governments to work at this task by some method other than that of eternally giving in. The realization of a Europe founded upon right was the greatest victory of all, the victory that neither Napoleon nor Foch wished to gain, and which required something more than successful strokes of strategy.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As for myself, what more can I say? I am bitterly censured for having refused to give my country a strategic frontier. How can I take seriously those who, both great and small, reproach me with this, since they know that I could not—apart from any question of the rights of peoples—annex the Rhineland without breaking off our alliance, WHICH NO ONE DARED TO SUGGEST TO ME?”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The [Anglo-American] Guarantee Pact thus assumed the position of the keystone of European peace, far above all theories. Its rejection, for that very reason, amounted to an indirect invitation for the thwarted aggressor to try again.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From the German point of view the monstrous problem thus set must inevitably be solved by the apotheosis of the German peoples. In the meantime, far from ‘German culture’ seeming disposed to reform itself, we hear it proclaiming louder than ever a universal right to supreme domination, which confers on it the right of life and death over the nations, to be asserted and enforced by all possible means. Ought we not all to feel menaced in our very vitals by this mad doctrine of universal Germanic supremacy over England, France, America, and every other country?”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whether we wish it or not, it is not the International Parliament of Geneva, subtle epitome of all the Parliaments of this world, with no executive powers, that will determine the peace of the future.”
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source