Georges Clemenceau Quotes

Les cimetières sont pleins de gens irremplaçables, qui ont tous été remplacés.

Il est plus facile de faire la guerre que la paix.

A man's life is interesting primarily when he has failed — I well know. For it's a sign that he tried to surpass himself.

When a man asks himself what is meant by action he proves that he isn't a man of action. Action is a lack of balance. In order to act you must be somewhat insane. A reasonably sensible man is satisfied with thinking.

A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he’s not a man of action. It is as if a tennis player before returning a ball stopped to think about his views of the physical and mental advantages of tennis. You must act as you breathe.

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.

“Germany is arming and France disarming”: that is the decisive feature of this moment of history when the two states of mind confront one another in such stark brutality that I defy any sane man to cast doubt on the evidence. Our people have come to this, that they seem to like enduring provocations. The history of the plebiscite violently rejecting the financial measures accepted by us in order to help Germany to discharge what may remain of her financial obligations seems a sufficient indication of the most furious hostility. Thus we see, in the relentless light of the facts, the German, in fighting mood and trim, and the heedless Frenchman, both applauding the orators who proclaim the violations of the Peace Treaty.

When I am told that a policy of concessions, more or less happily graduated, is going to regain for us the goodwill of our former enemies I can only be glad to hear it, for I desire nothing so much as a state of stable equilibrium in Europe. But I must be able to perceive some sign of a favourable response to the goodwill that I am asked to manifest. Judge then of my surprise when I discover that Germany goes on arming and France disarming. The position is that the most scientific preparations for war are being carried out on the other side of the frontier. With us frontiers lie open, armaments are insufficient, effectives are well below the numbers recognized as necessary, while on the other side a feverish life of reconstruction is developing and reorganizing, by the adaptation of fresh material, every department of their war equipment as well as their means of transport.

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.

I scan the horizon in vain for any sign of a recovery. Day by day the position grows more serious through our inertia, while the designs of German violence shrink from no ways or means or instrument.

What are we doing, then, if not proceeding, article by article, to restore Germany's power, which, by a truly miraculous exercise of will, after its complete collapse during the War, is about to be built up again in the retrograde peace, which is surrendering, stage by stage, everything that human justice had gained by our victory? After the restoration of Germany's moral prestige by a lie we have the upsetting of the financial reparations by the progressive series of mutilations of the Treaty down to the payment of the so-called debts to America!

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.

I ask myself whether there is to be found a single Frenchman who could admit that we should refrain from exacting from the Germans their obligations, the burden of which is about to be transferred to a victor ruined by the systematic plunderings of the conquered invader. When I ask for an explanation I am generally met with a shrug of the shoulders, accusations against the Press, Parliament, the politicians, and an assurance that after a few more concessions every one will be satisfied. As a result of which we give way to-day, after having given way yesterday, to the demands of Germany, who is only awaiting the additional last concessions to render an account that will never be the final one until we are completely despoiled.

Is it not fairly clear that the very idea of a fatherland, which is still so potent among us, has lost some of its native strength in the hearts of those who have deliberately allowed themselves to be despoiled of that French pride so essential if the fatherland is to live and not die?

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.