"As for me, even though I have been accused of anti-Semitism countless times, no one has ever heard me make anti-Semitic statements or engage in anti-Semitic behavior."

"I'm not saying that the gas chambers didn't exist. I couldn't see them myself."

"An ancient dictum says that when Zeus wanted to destroy someone, he would first drive him mad."

"When Joan D' Arc was asked by her judges why as a Christian she did not love the British, she answered that she did love them, but she loved British in their country. In the same way, we do not hate the Turks, we love them, but in their country."

"What's surprising is that the people who fought against torture here are the communists."

"You cannot speak on behalf of a nation when you have no mandate to do so."

"The Vichy government was under occupation and carried out the orders of the German occupier."

"There wasn't anti-Semitism in France."

"Political rivals attacked me. I was savagely beaten. I was kicked in the face and I lost my eye as a result."

"If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail."

"When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines."

"The government would have preferred not to take a stand, but the constant presence of the Israeli-Arab conflict on our television screens made it an issue that could no longer be avoided."

"France was an occupied country, a country that surrendered and was left without the right to choose."

"Everyone sees drama from his own perspective."

"The Second World War claimed tens of millions of victims."

"There was no reason to label us as anti-Semitic."

"Millions also perished in the Chinese camps, and there have been terrible genocides in Cambodia and Vietnam."

"After all, you're not exactly a nation like all the other nations. You are unique, if only because you are such an ancient people, and because of the way you are spread all over the world and your obvious success in many fields."

"I'm always suspicious of people who repent of other people's sins."

"In recent years - before the intifada - there were three or four incidents of anti-Semitism a year, and that's out of 18 million crimes and violations of the law."

"By analogy, if we were to develop a soccer team, then we would not invite basketball and volleyball players to the try outs. We would invite soccer players to apply."

"In my speeches, I always condemned communism, national-socialism and fascism."

"When two drivers curse each other on the road, and one of them happens to be a Jew, you can't define that as anti-Semitism."