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mnottertail -> RE: What are some of your most controversial opinions? (2/15/2008 10:05:55 AM)
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We have learnt, a little late no doubt, that for States, as for individuals, real wealth consists not in acquiring or invading the domains of others, but in developing one's own. We have learnt that all extensions of territory, all usurpations, by force or by fraud, which have long been connected by prejudice with the idea of 'rank', of 'hegemony', of 'political stability', of 'superiority' in the order of the Powers, are only the cruel jests of political lunacy, false estimates of power, and that their real effect is to increase the difficuly of administraion and to diminish the happines and security of the governed for the vanity of those who govern... France ought, therefore, to remain within her own boundaries, she owes it to her glory, to her sense of justice and of reason, to her own interest and to that of the other nations who will become free.
I said this on the occasion of your beheading Louie, pity that neither Napoleon, Hitler, or Bush learned from your mistakes or heeded my words.
Regardez,
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord
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