You should remove your addition of quotation marks from the second block-quote. Based on the article, it is apparent that the sentence is the author paraphrasing what he thinks Valéry Giscard d'Estaing said, not a direct quotation.

Interestingly, the author's source appears to be an Irish Times article (interview referred to here, but probably not the actual article) in which Giscard d'Estaing complains about his words being taken out of context and their meaning being distorted.