Jean Giraudoux

It would be better if only the old men fought the wars. Every country is the country of youth. When its youth dies, it dies with them.

The theatre is like a Catholic Mass of language.

If you sing a song of peace with enough gestures and grimaces, it becomes a war song.

As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.

I don't like knowing about other people's feelings. There is nothing more embarrassing. Just as when you play cards and you see your opponent's hand. You are sure to lose.

It's odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for.

When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome.

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.

There are no great people. There are only great topics.

There is an invisible garment woven around us from our earliest years; it is made of the way we eat, the way we walk, the way we greet people.

A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.

Men don't deceive their wives unless they love them. When they love them most, they deceive them. It's a form of fidelity, their deceit.

Ask any soldier. To kill a man is to merit a woman.

I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.

One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.

The older we women grow, the more clearly we see what men really are: hypocrites, boasters, he-goats. The older men grow, the more they doll us up with every perfection.

Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.

Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.

The secret of success is sincerity.

A golf course is the epitome of all that is purely transitory in the universe; a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible.