“In these pages, I continue the struggle to which my whole life is devoted. Describing, I also characterize and evaluate; narrating, I also defend myself, and more often attack. It seems to me that this is the only method of making an autobiography objective in a higher sense, that is, of making it the most adequate expression of personality, conditions, and epoch.
Objectivity is not the pretended indifference with which confirmed hypocrisy, in speaking of friends and enemies, suggests indirectly to the reader what it finds inconvenient to state directly. Objectivity of this sort is nothing but a conventional trick. I do not need it. Since I have submitted to the necessity of writing about myself — nobody has as yet succeeded in writing an autobiography without writing about himself — I can have no reason to hide my sympathies or antipathies, my loves or my hates.”

Nobel autobiography (1975)

Garantissez-moi de mes amis, écrivait Gourville proscrit et fugitif, je saurai me défendre de mes ennemis. ("Defend me from my friends," wrote Gourville, exile and fugitive, "I can defend myself from my enemies.") — Gabriel Sénac de Meilhan, Considérations sur l'esprit et les moeurs (1788): "De L'Amitié." Sénac de Meilhan was quoting Jean Hérault, sieur de Gourville (1625 - 1703).
The remark has often been attributed to Voltaire and to Claude-Louis-Hector de Villars.
Misattributed

quote of c. 1927
Quote in 'Autour de Ballet Méchanique', as quoted in Fernand Léger – The Later Years -, catalogue ed. Nicolas Serota; published by the Trustees of the Whitechapel Art gallery, London, Prestel Verlag, 1988, pp. 21-22
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1920's

A Ship of the Line (1938)

Source: The mechanization of the world picture, 1961, p. 499

Speech in Stourport (12 January 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp. 15-16.
1925
Context: If there is anything... it is my training, which has given me, whether I can use it or not, a knowledge and a sympathy very difficult for any man to attain who has had an exclusively political training I regard it as of the greatest value to myself that during the formative years of my life, and during the ten and twenty years when I first started work in the world, I worked in close contact with all classes of people in this country, and enjoyed, through no credit to myself, the goodwill which I have inherited from generations that have gone before me and left behind a name for honesty, fair play, right judgment, and kindliness to those with whom they worked. Through that, whether I succeed or not, I believe I have an understanding of the mind of the people of the country which I could have gained in no other way. It is through this that I have that ineradicable belief and faith in our people which sustains me through good times and evil, and it is because of this that I have every confidence that, whatever troubles may come to this country, or in this country at any time, the native strength and virtue of our people will overcome everything. There is only one thing which I feel is worth giving one's whole strength to, and that is the binding together of all classes of our people in an effort to make life in this country better in every sense of the word. That is the main end and object of my life in politics.

Source: The Stranger (1908), p. 403

On his numerous mistresses, as quoted in The True Story of the Empress Eugénie (1921) by Guy Jean Raoul Eugène Charles Emmanuel de Savoie-Carignan Soissons, Ccomte de Soissons
Variant translation: It is usually the man who attacks. As for me, I defend myself, and I often capitulate.
As quoted in The Mistresses : Domestic Scandals of the 19th-Century Monarchs (1966) by E. Cobham Brewer

Source: The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), chapter II, "Rio de Janeiro", 18 April 1832, page 29 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?viewtype=image&itemID=F11&pageseq=48