“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 … - Georges Clemenceau

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.

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.

Fate has decided. The Conference has spoken. It has been obeyed. Why could it not have kept a strong hand over the execution of the Treaty? But I will not anticipate. Overflowing with German braggadocio, von Brockdorff-Rantzau later on told us that we hated Germany, because we had dared to defend ourselves against her aggression, but our European countries, and those organized on European lines, need only go back to their familiar slipshod management of everyday life for the vanquished foe to dare to rear his head arrogantly as if he were the victor, to look in the face the crimes he had acknowledged, and to venture, owing to the general discouragement, to demand a reckoning from those who had put an end to his wrongdoing.