Word: rochefoucaulds
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...study of Paleolithic cave art, arrived to inspect their extraordinary find. He theorized that Lascaux's broad galleries might indicate a magical or religious function for the drawings; Lascaux became known as the "Sistine Chapel of prehistory," and people clamored to see it. After the war, the La Rochefoucauld family, which owned the property, authorized work to enlarge the entrance, shunt off the water that had once cascaded through the cave and install steps and concrete flooring through much of the underground complex. As many as 1,700 visitors traipsed through Lascaux every day. But by the late 1950s...
When the news of the storming of the Bastille reached Versailles, the hapless Louis XVI expressed the hope that this was a mere revolt. "No, sir," replied the Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, "it's a great revolution." For the sake of the House of Windsor, we must trust that those advising the royal family at this unhappy time will also be blunt. The national outpouring of affection and grief for the "people's princess" could be dismissed as a form of collective hysteria that will die away as surely as the echo of muffled funeral bells. No tumbrels loom...
...things that would never be considered politically correct and are sometimes difficult to swallow, but he is fiercely unapologetic. He speaks with a forthrightness and integrity that not even flourishes of rhetoric can disguise. He is also marvelously entertaining and has a way with maxims that would put La Rochefoucauld to shame. One priceless example: "Love sits on a dungheap, and woe to him that slips...
...military coalition. "He was most complex," Miller writes. "Dwight Eisenhower could and did outsmart, outthink, outmaneuver, outgovern, and outcommand almost anybody you'd care to name, including Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and yes, even Franklin Roosevelt. I don't know that he ever read Niccolo Machiavelli or La Rochefoucauld, but he practiced what they preached...
...that very air is the oxygen of the epigram. W.H. Auden, who collected and concocted them, readily admitted that "aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre. Implicit is a conviction that [the writer] is wiser than his readers." François de La Rochefoucauld was a duke; elbowed out of prominence in Louis XIV's court, he retreated to an estate to polish his words until nobility could see its face in the surface: "We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others"; "In jealousy there is more self-love than love"; "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice...