Napoleon Quotes

“Music is what tell us that the human race is greater than we realize.”
― Napoleon

“Surely, comrades, you don't want Jones back?”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.”
― Victor Hugo

“Napoleon,when hearing aboutLaplace's latest book, said, 'M.Laplace,they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its creator.'

Laplaceresponds, 'Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là. (I had no need of that hypothesis.)”
― Pierre-Simon Laplace

“All great events hang by a single thread. The clever man takes advantage of everything, neglects nothing that may give him some added opportunity; the less clever man, by neglecting one thing, sometimes misses everything.”
― Napoleon

“Your Excellency, I have no need of this hypothesis.”
― Pierre Laplace

“I have often noticed that nationalism is at its strongest at the periphery. Hitler was Austrian, Bonaparte Corsican. In postwar Greece and Turkey the two most prominent ultra-right nationalists had both been born in Cyprus. The most extreme Irish Republicans are in Belfast and Derry (and Boston and New York). Sun Yat Sen, father of Chinese nationalism, was from Hong Kong. The Serbian extremists Milošević and Karadžić were from Montenegro and their most incendiary Croat counterparts in theUstashetended to hail from the frontier lands of Western Herzegovina.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“This society [Jesuits] has been a greater calamity to mankind than the French Revolution, orNapoleon's despotism or ideology. It has obstructed the progress of reformation and the improvement of the human mind in society much longer and more fatally.

{Letter toThomas Jefferson,November 4, 1816. Adams wrote an anonymous 4 volume work on the destructive history of the Jesuits}”
― John Adams, The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson & Abigail & John Adams

“Of all public figures and benefactors of mankind, no one is loved by history more than the literary patron. Napoleon was just a general of forgotten battles compared with the queen who paid for Shakespeare's meals and beer in the tavern. The statesman who in his time freed the slaves, even he has a few enemies in posterity, whereas the literary patron has none. We thank Gaius Maecenas for the nobility of soul we attribute to Virgil; but he isn’t blamed for the selfishness and egocentricity that the poet possessed. The patron creates 'literature through altruism,' something not even the greatest genius can do with a pen.”
― Roman Payne

“Esprit de l’escalier. Staircase wit; the brilliant thing you should have said, coming to you only as you leave by the stairs”
― Rebecca Rosenberg, Champagne Widows: First Woman of Champagne, Veuve Clicquot

“It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth inPersuasion,for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again.

This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpieceWatership Downis the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything sinceThe Wind in the Willows,but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Wars are senseless and cruel, fought for our power hungry emperor, not for the people.”
― Rebecca Rosenberg, Champagne Widows: First Woman of Champagne, Veuve Clicquot

“Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.”
― Rebecca Rosenberg, Champagne Widows: First Woman of Champagne, Veuve Clicquot

“Heard straight from Napoleon’s mouth himself,” I say. “Champagne! In victory we deserve it, and in defeat we need it.”
― Rebecca Rosenberg, Champagne Widows: First Woman of Champagne, Veuve Clicquot

“Victor Hugo continues to be popular today not because of his multivolume works, which people may never have time or patience to read, but rather because of his unique experiences, his political activities and his immense influence on French history.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“Victor Hugo n’est pas uniquement reconnu pour ses œuvres, cet intellectuel engagé et influent est reconnu surtout pour sa carrière politique très importante et son influence énorme sur l’histoire de la France.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“What a pity to see a mind as great as Napoleon's devoted to trivial things such as empires, historic events, the thundering of cannons and of men; he believed in glory, in posterity, in Caesar; nations in turmoil and other trifles absorbed all his attention... How could he fail to see that what really mattered was something else entirely?”
― Paul Valéry

“Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared, the most isolated and late-born man there has even been, and in him the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh--one might well ponder what kind of problem it is; Napoleon this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo

“It can certainly be misleading to take the attributes of a movement, or the anxieties and contradictions of a moment, and to personalize or 'objectify' them in the figure of one individual. Yet ordinary discourse would be unfeasible without the use of portmanteau terms—like 'Stalinism,' say—just as the most scrupulous insistence on historical forces will often have to concede to the sheer personality of a Napoleon or a Hitler. I thought then, and I think now, that Osama bin Laden was a near-flawless personification of the mentality of a real force: the force of Islamic jihad. And I also thought, and think now, that this force absolutely deserves to be called evil, and that the recent decapitation of its most notorious demagogue and organizer is to be welcomed without reserve. Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Enemy

“Ma vraie gloire n’est pas d’avoir gagné quarante batailles. Waterloo effacera le souvenir de tant de victoires. Ce que rien n’effacera, ce qui vivra éternellement, c’est mon Code civil.”
― Napoléon Bonaparte

“Monseigneur Bienvenu was no genius. He would have feared those sublime peaks from which some, even the very great among them such as Swedenborg and Pascal, have slipped into insanity. Certainly, these powerful conceits have their moral usefulness and by these arduous paths one may approach ideal perfection. But he took the shorter path: the Gospel.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“I will make use of every last resource of my empire; it possesses even more than my enemies yet think. But even if Divine Providence decrees that my dynasty should cease to reign on the throne of my ancestors, then after having exhausted all the means in my power I will grow my beard down to here’ (he pointed his hand to his chest) ‘and will go off and eat potatoes with the very last of my peasants rather than sign a peace which would shame my fatherland and that dear nation whose sacrifices for me I know how to appreciate…Napoleon or me, I or him, we cannot both rule at the same time; I have learned to understand him and he will not deceive me.”
― Dominic Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814

“Look at history: We know very well what happened to Christianity after the Church became powerful. It seems that the corruption of the clergy has usually been in direct proportion to the power of the Church at any given time. Some of the popes have actually been depraved. Islam didn't turn out any better. Twenty-four years after the Prophet's death his
son-in-law, the Caliph Uthman ibn Affan, was killed by rebels, and this event was followed by power-struggles and violence among the Muslims
and a prolonged period of conflict within Islam. Nor does the later history of lslam indicate that it adhered to its ideals any better than Christianity did. The French Revolution was followed by the dictatorship of Napoleon, the Russian Revolution by that of Stalin. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920, the revolutionary ideals were progressively drained of their content until Mexico found itself under the dictatorship of a party that continued to call itself "revolutionary" without being so in reality.”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How

“Do you accept reality, or shall the narcissistic individual have the absolute right to live in their own permanent fantasy world, and compel everyone else to go along with their fantasy? When the lunatic in a mental asylum says he is Napoleon, we must bellow, 'Vive l’Empereur!' and join his Grande Armée, and all march to Waterloo to meet our fate.”
― David Sinclair, Without the Mob, There Is No Circus

“Als ik de teloorgang van het geweten zie, de heerschappij van het geld, de verspreiding van de corruptie, dan denk ik over de grootse dingen uit het verleden en kom ik soms in de verleiding om tegen heel Frankrijk te zeggen: Laten we over de keizers spreken, dat zal ons goed doen.”
― Victor Hugo

“The stars and cosmos abandoned Napoleon when he abandoned Josephine. There is a universal cosmic law that there can only be one Spiritual Wife for each Master or Cosmic Hero. If he abandons his Spiritual Wife, the stars and cosmos will abandon him.”
― Miguel Serrano

“Aluminum used to be more expensive than gold. Napoleon had an aluminum cutlery set that he only used for visiting royalty. The gold set he used everyday.”
― Weike Wang, Chemistry

“No ha entendido que los sistemas cambian y que, mientras no sea el centro de uno de ellos, debe mantenerse prudentemente en la sombra.”
― Max Gallo, Napoleon.

“Prior to the advent of military staffs, armies and navies made military decisions via councils of war, in which the commander would assemble his major subordinates, solicit and pitch courses of action, and seek a consensus on which one to pursue. Napoleon eschewed such meetings once he had enough rank to forego them, calling them" a cowardly proceeding "intended more to shift blame than to determine an effective plan.”
― B.A. Friedman, On Operations: Operational Art and Military Disciplines

“In 1812 Russia was invaded by the Napoleonic hordes. The entire nation, headed by the leading Russians of those days, rose in defense of the country. The rout of the arrogant foe before whom all Western Europe trembled, evoked a wave of national consciousness”
― F.V. Konstantinov, Role of advanced ideas in development of society