Quote by Marcel Proust

“All in all, French armies wrought much suffering in Europe, but they also radically changed the lay of the land. In much of Europe,…

— Daron Acemoğlu

“In countries of more advanced civilisation and of a more insurrectionary spirit, the public, accustomed to expect everything to be done for them by…

— John Stuart Mill

“Aristocracy has three successive stages: the age of superiority, the age of privilege, and the age of vanity. Once through with the first, it…

— Chateaubriand

“If there was a spectre haunting France in the 1780's, it was not that of revolution but that of state bankruptcy. The whole social…

— John Morris Roberts

“If the empire were to collapse, I should personally feel extremely sad. I absolutely do not believe that the personal rule of Napoleon III…

— Franz Liszt

“The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today…

— Harvey Cox

“By hamstringing the ability of French governments to act in the interests of the French people – or, to put it more realistically, by…

— Bernard Connolly

Well, I think they're going to learn that an awful lot of French people changed their minds. In 1940, the Third Republic had made…

— Robert O. Paxton

“It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of…

— Anthony Doerr

“Montaigne’s half-century was so disastrous for France that it took another half-century to recover from it—and in some ways recovery never came, for the…

— Sarah Bakewell

“The old nobility was the most irreligious class of society before 1789, and the most pious after 1793 ...”

— Alexis de Tocqueville

In reality, the likelihood of reaching the pinnacle of capitalist society today is only marginally better than were the chances of being accepted into…

— Alain de Botton