Georges Clemenceau quotes - page 3
Georges Clemenceau was a French statesman and journalist, most famous for his leadership during World War I. Known as "The Tiger," he played a key role in shaping the Treaty of Versailles. He remains a symbol of French determination and resilience. Here are 55 of his quotes:
My education was built up upon ruthlessly hard-and-fast ideas crowned by a patriotism that nothing could shake. In the insurrection of Vendée, allied with the foreigner against Revolutionary France, the two qualities of patriot and republican were so merged in one another that the Chouans called us patauds, an insult that my forbears were proud of. The fatherland was, and could only be, everybody's home, where energies were developed in common. To renounce one's country had neither sense nor meaning. You might as well have expected the child to want to leave the shelter of its mother's wing. The home, the country, this was no theory; it was a natural phenomenon that had been realized from the very earliest ages of mankind. Animals had a temporary home in their lairs, man a permanent one in his country.
Georges Clemenceau
It is Germany, guilty of the greatest crime in the history of Europe, a crime premeditated, prepared, and carried out in broad daylight, who presents herself vanquished at the tribunal of Europe and the civilized world, no longer to give an account but to demand one. A lie sets her free. A lie puts us in the dock. And our policy of incoherency run wild is about to lay itself open to processes of dismemberment that will reduce the Treaty of Versailles to a state of nullity. Every day will see Germany requesting, demanding, to have her burdens lightened in order to heap them on France, already drained to the last drop of her blood, and every day something of the burden of defeat will be transferred from Germany's shoulders to what still exists of France by the good graces of the Treaty's executors.
Georges Clemenceau
If Germany, still obsessed by her traditional militarism, persists in her Deutschland über Alles, well-let the die be cast. We shall take up the atrocious War again at the point where we left it off. We must have the courage to prepare for it, instead of frittering away our strength in lies that no one believes, from conference to conference.
Georges Clemenceau
To-day Germany is once more trying to construct, by methods of peace, a Germanic Empire that she failed to bring into being by means of war. That she could never do without eventualities that may change the destinies of a France exposed to every hostile enterprise. What will become of us in this welter of countries the development of whose strength in the future no man can foresee? There are nations that are beginning. There are nations that are coming to an end. Our consciousness of our own acts entails the fixing of responsibilities. France will be what the men of France deserve.
Georges Clemenceau
Georges Clemenceau
Occupation: French Leader
Born: September 28, 1841
Died: November 24, 1929
Quotes count: 55
Wikipedia: Georges Clemenceau
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