Even in Britain, the trade unions tell me that employment contracts have less protection than in the past.

Therefore one should speak at the same time of national citizenship and wider European citizenship.

The European model is in danger if we obliterate the principle of personal responsibility.

The problem with a purely collective system is not only that it requires economic growth, and the right sort of demographic trends, but that it prevents people thinking about their futures in a responsible way.

This weakening is worsened by the widening distance between the governed and their governments.

Yes, the European model remains superior to that of America and Japan.

This desire for equity must not lead to an excess of welfare, where nobody is responsible for anything.

My problem is how to find the best way of being useful.

We have to struggle against the conservatives from all sides, not only the right-wingers, but also the left-wing conservatives who don't want to change anything.

My presidential victory, if it had happened, would have been artificial in relation to the Socialist party. It may be that on my deathbed, I will come to regret my decision, but for the moment, I live at peace with it.

Any union that can't accept workers choosing their own representatives through universal franchise is finished.

The problem of how we finance the welfare state should not obscure a separate issue: if each person thinks he has an inalienable right to welfare, no matter what happens to the world, that's not equity, it's just creating a society where you can't ask anything of people.

These days there are not enough of such intermediary groups, between the state and the individual, with the result that political leaders are often unduly guided by opinion polls.

For me, socialism has always been about liberty and solidarity, but also about responsibility.

I cannot resign myself to the decline of Europe, and of France.

If you don't have collective agreements between unions and employers, governments have to legislate more.

The unions may continue to decline, but if they do, it'll be their fault.

I had to think whether, after 50 years of hard slog, I was still lucid and fresh enough for the job.

Fundamentally, American society is composed of individuals who don't go out of their way to do each other favours.

The countries that share this conception should be able to go further together, without excluding the others, since they can still live in a greater community of exchange and co-operation.

Even in Britain, the trade unions tell me that employment contracts have less protection than in the past.

The driving force behind the liberal counter-offensive in Europe has been a reaction against irresponsibility.

The unions still have a job to do, representing their members' interests to governments and parliaments. And I think collective agreements still have a role, alongside markets and laws.

I would not be opposed to devising a new system of pensions, in which one part was based on collective provision, but which also gave incentives for people to take out an additional, personal plan.

Cinema explains American society. It's like a Western, with good guys and bad guys, where the weak don't have a place.

The European model is, first, a social and economic system founded on the role of the market, for no computer in the world can process information better than the market.

This desire for equity must not lead to an excess of welfare where nobody is responsible for anything.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Although Alchemy has now fallen into contempt, and is even considered a thing of the past, the physicain should not be influenced by such judgements.

I do like to drive fast and I have gotten pulled over in the past. I use my skills to get out of tickets.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

The best prophet of the future is the past.

Some of the best lessons we ever learn are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom and success of the future.

Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.

Historians tell the story of the past, novelists the story of the present.

You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

Terrorism, ladies and gentlemen, in my eyes I have a very, very, very simple explanation. Gangs of criminals, killers, used unfortunately by certain governments in the past for political purposes, who are on their own now as gangs.

In the past 3-4 years I've developed a habit of keeping numerous small cassette recorders in my house and in a bag with me so that I'm able to commit to tape memory song ideas on a constant basis.

By this time it was past six, and the enemy's van and ours were at too great a distance to engage, I perceived some of their ships stretching to the northward; and I imagined they were going to form a new line.

Firms would be given initial entitlements to gross markup on the basis of past performance. These entitlements would be transferable and a market in them would be developed.

I mean that at least 80% of the Russian people feel destitute. It's the people who had their past and future taken from them - they don't get paid - many of them face a wall. They have nowhere to go.

They spend their time looking forward to the past.

Like most of those who study history, he (Napoleon III) learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

It also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present, future or past, either.

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States.

Yes, romance has found it's way into my heart in the past.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.