Europe Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The guns are turning away from Europe and Russia and Iran and Iraq and they're turning to us.

From where I stand, I do not see the lost people of the South Seas, the defeated and the despairing, shrunken shadows of those who went before. What I observe are the proud descendants of some of the most remarkable explorers and settlers who ever lived. We carry the cultural and historical inheritance of ocean navigators of peerless skill and their courageous kin who crossed vast distances before the tribes of Europe had ventured forth from their small part of the earth. Our forebearers populated islands scattered over the world's greatest stretch of water, covering a fifth of the planet's surface. It was one of the most amazing migrations in history, a triumphant testimony to human endurance, fortitude and achievement.

Kissinger brought peace to Vietnam the same way Napoleon brought peace to Europe: by losing.

The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.

On the eve of the First World War

Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon

The challenge we face is how to integrate the Muslim world into the global economy. Asia has become part of it, but not Africa or the Middle East. One could realistically think about a Marshall Plan with respect to this part of the world, to succeed in integrating the Muslim and Arab world into the global economy as we did in Europe after World War II. For example, we've wasted hundreds of billions of dollars on the Iraq war. Had we taken a third of this money and invested it into a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, the benefits would have been ten times more than wasting it on a war.

Nouriel Roubini

I took a bottle of pills. I'd been in Europe and I had a lot of absinthe and I was just drinking and drinking, trying to, you know, just shut my body down.

The print-made split between head and heart is the trauma which affects Europe from Machiavelli till the present.

Marshall McLuhan

Some of our German passengers on the ship would be crying. The Brits were the same way. They were crying, because they realized a new war was about to break out across Europe, with Hitler at the head of the goose-stepping parade.

Because European countries now resolve differences through negotiation and consensus, there's sometimes an assumption that the entire world functions in the same way. But let us never forget... beyond Europe's borders, in a world where oppression and violence are very real, liberation is still a moral goal, and freedom and security still need defenders.

Whoa, Dimitri," I said, tossing my bag on the floor. "I realize this is actually a current hit in Eastern Europe right now, but do you think we could maybe listen to something that wasn't recorded before I was born? Only his eyes flicked toward me; the rest of his posture remained the same. "What does it matter to you? I'm the one who's going to be listening to it. You'll be outside running.

Purity of race does not exist. Europe is a continent of energetic mongrels.

H. A. L. Fisher

History does not tend to the better, Doc, it does not, it does not. We imagine so because events have produced our glorious selves. Think, however. Put aside the romantic legends and look at the facts. The average Frenchman in 1800 was no more unfree than the average Englishman. The French Empire could have brought Europe together, and could have been liberalized from within, and there might have been no World War I in which Western civilization cut its own throat. Because that's what's happened, you know. We're still busy bleeding to death, but we haven't far to go now.

In 1960, only sixteen million Americans did not trace their ancestors to Europe. Today, the number is eighty million. No nation has ever undergone so rapid and radical a transformation.

Our little drawing Room [Constable's lodgings at Hamptstead with a view on London] commands a view unequalled in Europe — from Westminster Abbey to Gravesend — the dome of St Paul's in the Air — realizes Michael Angelo's Idea on seeing that of the Pantheon — 'I will build such a thing in the Sky.'

Latin literature would almost certainly have been lost without the Irish, and illiterate Europe would hardly have developed its great national literatures without the example of the Irish, the first vernacular literature to be written down.

The nineteenth century moved fast and furious, so that one who moved in it felt sometimes giddy, watching it spin; but the eleventh moved faster and more furiously still. The Norman conquest of England was an immense effort, and its consequences were far-reaching, but the first crusade was altogether the most interesting event in European history. Never has the western world shown anything like the energy and unity with which she then flung herself on the East, and for the moment made the East recoil. Barring her family quarrels, Europe was a unity then, in thought, will and object. Christianity was the unit.

What Asia's postwar economic miracle demonstrates is that
capitalism is a path toward economic development that is potentially
available to all countries. No underdeveloped country in the
Third World is disadvantaged simply because it began the growth
process later than Europe, nor are the established industrial powers
capable of blocking the development of a latecomer, provided
that country plays by the rules of economic liberalism.

Francis Fukuyama

When we look at the progress made since the end of the Second World War, it is hard to argue that economically, European cooperation has been anything other than a great success. Of course, since 2008, this has not been the whole story. In Southern Europe particularly, talk of economic success would be met with confusion and anger.

If you live in Europe... things change... but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.

Nadine Gordimer

The school was nothing but reminiscence — of an Italian hill town, a French abbey, an English academy, the different sources improbably but convincingly melded into a fantasy about the classic sites of Europe as imagined by exiles from cold peripheral lands, nostalgia about somebody else's past.

It seems to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe, and has least support in the church-going United States. I attribute that to the fact that, for the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal: it is a grave sin, which causes one to lose his soul. But losing this life, in exchange for the next? The Christian attitude is reflected in the words Robert Bolt's play has Thomas More saying to the headsman: 'Friend, be not afraid of your office. You send me to God'. For the nonbeliever, on the other hand, to deprive a man of his life is to end his existence.

We shall never sheathe the sword which we have not lightly drawn until Belgium recovers in full measure all and more than all that she has sacrificed, until France is adequately secured against the menace of aggression, until the rights of the smaller nationalities of Europe are placed upon an unassailable foundation, and until the military domination of Prussia is wholly and finally destroyed.

Blacks were not enslaved because they were black, but because they were available at the time. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black slave was brought to the Western Hemisphere. Only late in history were human beings even capable of crossing an ocean to get millions of other human beings of a different race. In the thousands of years before that, not only did Europeans enslave other Europeans, Asians enslaved other Asians, Africans enslaved other Africans, and the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere enslaved other native peoples of the Western Hemisphere.

The First World War had begun – imposed on the statesmen of Europe by railway timetables. It was an unexpected climax to the railway age.

A. J. P. Taylor

Benito Mussolini had barely seized power in Italy before the Vatican made an official treaty with him.... Catholicism became the only recognized religion in Italy... and in return urged its followers to vote for Mussolini's party. Pope Pius XI described [Mussolini] as 'a man sent by providence.'... Across southern Europe, the church was a reliable ally in the instatement of fascist regimes....

Christopher Hitchens