Sourced

• The reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living.
  • Stein, Gertrude. Paris France. New York: Liveright, 1970. (p. 8)

• Propaganda is not French, it is not civilized to want other people to believe what you believe because the essence of being civilised is to possess yourself as you are, and if you possess yourself as you are you of course cannot possess any one else, it is not your business.
  • Stein, Gertrude. Paris France. New York: Liveright, 1970. (p. 56)

• Honour to the French!—They have taken good care of the two greatest needs of human society — of good eating and citizenly equality; they have made the greatest advances in cookery and in freedom..."
  • Heinrich Heine. Heinrich Heine's Pictures of Travel Ch. XXIX

Unsourced

• I like Frenchmen very much, because even when they insult you they do it so nicely.
  • Josephine Baker

• In France everything is a matter for jest. People make quips about the scaffold, about Napoleon's defeat on the banks of The Beresina, and about the barricades of our revolutions. So, at the assizes of the Last Judgment, there will always be a Frenchmen to crack a joke.
  • Honore de Balzac

• The Frenchman is first and foremost a man. He is likeable often just because of his weaknesses, which are always thoroughly human, even if despicable.
  • Henry Miller