France has a very important relationship with Germany. But that does not mean that we agree about everything or that two of our universities or companies are not going to compete.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

Blaise Pascal

He that can live alone resembles the brute beast in nothing, the sage in much, and God in everything.

Baltasar Gracian

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Norman Mailer

An old young man, will be a young old man.

Benjamin Franklin

He who is plenteously provided for from within, needs but little from without.

Johann von Goethe

Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings.I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest if they were lucky or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. J

Christopher Hitchens

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes so with present time.

Leonardo da Vinci

After all, C++ isn't a perfect match for Java's design aims either.

Bjarne Stroustrup

The world keeps happening, in accordance with its rules; it's up to us to make sense of it and give it value.

Sean Carroll

My mother and stepfather were married 43 years, so I have watched a long marriage. I feel like I had a very good role model for that. And, you know, it's just a number.

Jamie Lee Curtis

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control these three alone lead one to sovereign power.

Alfred Tennyson

The power-hungry individual follows a path to his own destruction.

Adler