Charles Gravier Quotes

With a plan and careful attention to details, we might some day build something even more beautiful than this building. We might build a nation men have only dreamed of-a nation founded on freedom for all and built to last forever.

If the French delirium is not properly repressed, it may be more or less fatal to the heart of Europe for the pestilential air must inevitably ravage and destroy everything it approaches.

Be it for the defense, or be it for the assertion of a nation’s liberty, I look upon the sword as a sacred weapon …. Abhor and stigmatize the sword? No, no, my lord, for at its blow a giant nation sprang from the waters of the Atlantic and by its redeeming magic, and in the quivering of its crimson light, the fettered Colony became a daring free Republic—prosperous, limitless and invincible.

We are informed you have already been called upon to waste your lives in a contest with us. Should you, by complying in this instance, assent to your new establishment, and a war break out with France, your wealth and your sons may be sent to perish in expeditions against their islands in the West Indies. It cannot be presumed that these considerations will have no weight with you, or that you are so lost to all sense of honor. We can never believe that the present race of Canadians are so degenerated as to possess neither the spirit, the gallantry, nor the courage of their ancestors. You certainly will not permit the infamy and disgrace of such pusillanimity to rest on your own heads, and the consequences of it on your children forever. We, for our parts, are determined to live free, or not at all; and are resolved, that posterity shall never reproach us with having brought slaves into the world.

Havana.- If 1959 was the Year of Liberation, 1960 was the Year of the Agrarian Reform. The nation lived days of intense transformations, not only political but, also, in every aspect of social and individual activity of its citizens.

Citizens, we have reason to fear that the Revolution, like Saturn, will successively devour all its children, and only produce despotism and the calamities which accompany it.

There is a rich and haughty King who is blessed with such neighbours as are not likely to disturb him and has nothing to fear from his miserable subjects; but the whole body of that state is full of boils and wounds and putrid sores. There is no real strength in it. The people are so unwilling to serve him that he is said to have put to death above fourscore thousand of his own soldiers within the space of fifteen years for flying from their colours, and if he were vigorously attacked, little help could be expected from a discontented nobility or a starving and despairing people.

To back away from France would be to undermine the cause of republicanism in America

There is a hundred times more enthusiasm for this revolution in any café in Paris than there is in all the United States together.

They were giving the substance of truth to what we were dreaming.

I was singularly struck to see the unanimous eruption of such keen and all-embracing sympathy for the revolt of a people against a king. The American insurrection took hold of the imagination like some fashion.

Since the discovery of Columbus, there has been no event of equal importance to the human race.

The Battle of Yorktown effectively ending the American Revolution was really a French military victory.

Has France absolutely decided to refuse us all succor, and thus become the victim of England and the laughingstock of Europe? ... We offer France in return for secret assistance a treaty of commerce which will secure to her for a certain number of years after the peace all the benefits with which for a century we have enriched England

I desire to serve your country as if it were my own, and I hope to find in the friendship of a generous people the true reward of a labor that I consecrate to them.

Every fisherman reduced to poverty by the English, has become a soldier and vows he will avenge the ruin of his family and his country's liberty

The quarrel between the colonies and the British government seems to become more serious every day ... It may prove the most fatal blow to the authority of the metropolis.

We are awaiting the moment when the fate of the Bostonians will be decided. General Gage will need much talent and much sagacity and patience to calm the spirit of insubordination which has possessed almost all the English colonists

If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them.

The moment I heard of America I loved her. The moment I knew she was fighting for freedom, I burnt with the desire of bleeding for her.

I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America, if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery.

A few [South American territories] will constitute themselves as conventional federal republics; almost inevitably the larger territories will establish monarchies, some so wretched that they will devour their natural and human resources in present and future revolutions.

Washington seems to think that they will be welcomed with open arms in Iraq, but that they shouldn’t count on it. It is foolish to think of creating a modern democracy in an artificial country with a divided society like Iraq. Do you realize that, by invading Iraq, they might yet precipitate a civil war.

The government has decided that the same force would be employed in America as if the inhabitants were French or Spanish enemies

The number of Loyalist émigrés who fled the United States ultimately exceeded the number of Frenchmen who fled their revolution.