Data di nascita: 28. Settembre 1841
Data di morte: 24. Novembre 1929
Georges Eugène Benjamin Clemenceau è stato un politico francese, primo ministro dal 1906 al 1909 e dal 1917 al 1920 e uno degli artefici del trattato di Versailles.
La guerre! c'est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires
Origine: Citato in G. Suarez, 60 années d'histoire française.
Origine: Frase attribuita già a Talleyrand, secondo A. Briand che la riferì a D. Lloyd George.
Origine: Da un discorso alla Camera dei deputati avvenuto nel 1883.
Origine: Citato in Enzo Biagi, Mille camere, Mondadori, Milano, 1984, p. 25.
Origine: Citato in Enzo Biagi, Buoni cattivi: esiste ancora una morale valida per tutti?, Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, Milano, 1991, p. 117. ISBN 88-17-11549-5
Origine: Da Aux embuscades de la vie.
Origine: Citato in Giuseppe Fumagalli, Chi l'ha detto?, Hoepli, 1921, p. 697.
Origine: Citato in Luciani, p. 67.
Origine: Citato in Luciani, p. 35.
As quoted in And Madly Teach : A Layman Looks at Public School Education (1949) by Mortimer Brewster Smith, p. 27
Post-Prime Ministerial
Conversation with Jean Martet (1 June 1928), Ch. 30
Conversation with Jean Martet (18 December 1927), Ch. 11, p. 167.
Contesto: 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.
Referring to his rival Raymond Poincaré, as quoted in Paris 1919 : Six Months That Changed the World (2003) by Margaret MacMillan, p. 33
South America To-Day : A Study of Conditions, Social, Political, and Commercial in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil (1911) http://www.archive.org/details/southamericatoda011092mbp Ch. 14, Brazilian Coffee, p. 395
Contesto: In the distance huge trees were still blazing, around us was a waste of ashes and of half-consumed boughs, and the falling rain seemed only to quicken the dying conflagration. In some of the great green boles were fearful gaping wounds through which the sap was oozing, while some tall trees still stretched to heaven their triumphant crown of foliage above a trunk all charred that would never sprout again. The Brazilians contemplate spectacles such as this with a wholly indifferent eye, and, indeed, even with satisfaction, for they see in the ruin only a promise of future harvests. To me the scene possessed only the horror of a slaughter-house.
South America To-Day : A Study of Conditions, Social, Political, and Commercial in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil (1911) http://www.archive.org/details/southamericatoda011092mbp Ch. 14, Brazilian Coffee, p. 395
Contesto: In the distance huge trees were still blazing, around us was a waste of ashes and of half-consumed boughs, and the falling rain seemed only to quicken the dying conflagration. In some of the great green boles were fearful gaping wounds through which the sap was oozing, while some tall trees still stretched to heaven their triumphant crown of foliage above a trunk all charred that would never sprout again. The Brazilians contemplate spectacles such as this with a wholly indifferent eye, and, indeed, even with satisfaction, for they see in the ruin only a promise of future harvests. To me the scene possessed only the horror of a slaughter-house.
Speech at the Paris Peace Conference (27 March 1919), quoted in Anthony Adamthwaite, Grandeur and Misery: France's Bid for Power in Europe 1914-1940 (London: Arnold, 1995), p. 40.
Contesto: After expending the greatest effort, and suffering the greatest sacrifices in blood in all history, we must not compromise the results of our victory... if the League of Nations cannot buttress its orders with military sanctions we must find this sanction elsewhere... I beg you to understand my state of mind, just as I am trying to understand yours. America is far away and protected by the ocean, England could not be reached by Napoleon himself. You are sheltered, both of you; we are not.
Letter (19 June 1902), in which he claims to have chosen the headline title for Émile Zola's famous open letter on the Dreyfus affair, as quoted in Clemenceau (1974) by D. R. Watson, and Brewer's Famous Quotations : 5000 Quotations and the Stories Behind Them (2006) by Nigel Rees
Quoted in Frances Stevenson's diary entry (12 December 1919), A. J. P. Taylor (ed.), Lloyd George: A Diary (London: Hutchinson, 1971), p. 192.
Prime Minister
Attributed to Clemenceau by Hans Bendix, in "Merry Christmas, America!" The Saturday Review of Literature (1 December 1945), p. 9; this appears to be the earliest reference to such a remark as one by Clemenceau, though earlier, in Frank Lloyd Wright : An Autobiography (1943) there is mention that "A witty Frenchman has said of us: 'The United States of America is the only nation to plunge from barbarism to degeneracy with no culture in between.'" Similar remarks are sometimes attributed without a source to Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.
Variants:
America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to decadence without the usual interval of civilization.
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between.
Post-Prime Ministerial
As quoted in Clemenceau and the Third Republic (1946) by John Hampden Jackson.
Prime Minister
