Quotes About Europeans

As a concerned American colleague writes to me: 'Europeans need to know there is a traveling theo-freak show which actually advocates reinstatement of Old Testament law - killing of homosexuals etc. - and the right to hold office, or even to vote, for Christians only. Middle class crowds cheer tot his rhetoric. If secularists are not vigilant, Dominionists and Reconstructionists will soon be mainstream in a true American theocracy.

MOST OF THE NATIONS OF the Middle East can be divided into those with long histories and no oil, and those that have lots of oil and very little history. With a few notable exceptions, both groups share a common feature: they were cobbled together by outsiders. The borders of the modern Middle East were drawn by Europeans after the First World War with no regard for the interests or backgrounds of the people who inhabited it.

White people were similarly invented. Europeans coming to America boarded ships as Germans, Poles, English, French, and so on. They soon learned that in America they had a new privileged identity based on something they had scarcely considered before: the pale color of their skins.

inhabitants of countries that were colonized by the Europeans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries knew how profoundly distressing it was to watch a cherished way of life disappearing and beloved traditions decried by powerful, disdainful foreigners.

Self-preservation's a man's first duty. And natives don't mind dying, you know. They don't feel about it as Europeans do.

On one occasion Aliverdi Khan told his elderly general, Mir Jafar Khan, that the Europeans were like a hive of bees, 'of whose honey you might reap benefit, but if you disturbed their hive they would sting you to death'.

On his deathbed, Haidar had written to Tipu with advice to his son on the art of good government. He warned him that the Company would attempt to exploit any weakness in the succession: 'The greatest obstacle you have to conquer is the jealousy of the Europeans,' he wrote. 'The English are today all-powerful in India. It is necessary to weaken them by war.

Tipu even asked his ambassadors to Ottoman Istanbul to secure for him the ijara – farm – of Basra so that, like the Europeans, he could establish an overseas settlement which would be a base for his vessels.

turning themselves in the eyes of many Europeans into something of a pariah nation. As a result, isolated from their baffled neighbours, the English were forced to scour the globe for new markets and commercial openings further afield. This they did with a piratical enthusiasm.

For at least a century before the 1914 war, Europeans had regarded it as axiomatic that someday the Middle East would be occupied by one or more of the Great Powers. Their great fear was that disputes about their respective shares might lead the European powers to fight ruinous wars against one another.

That indigenous Americans lived in generally free societies, and that Europeans did not, was never really a matter of debate in these exchanges: both sides agreed this was the case.

It is much the same with the question of inequality. If we ask, not 'what are the origins of social inequality?' but 'what are the origins of the question about the origins of social inequality?' (in other words, how did it come about that, in 1754, the Académie de Dijon would think this an appropriate question to ask?), then we are immediately confronted with a long history of Europeans arguing with one another about the nature of faraway societies

It is one of the great ironies of history that modern racism—probably the single greatest evil of our last two centuries—had to be invented largely because Europeans continued to refuse to listen to the arguments of the intellectuals and jurists and did not accept that anyone they believed to be a full and equal human being could ever be justifiably enslaved.

Mankato was originally called Mahkato—meaning "greenish blue earth"—by its earliest inhabitants, the Dakota, although it didn't look any different to me. It became Mankato because of a spelling error that was never corrected, possibly made by the eighteenth-century Europeans searching for the Northwest Passage who settled there after getting lost on the Minnesota River.

Europeans say they are proud of their social fabric, of strong rights for workers and the weak in society.

Most of history is indisputably written by the winners, yet "winning" at Poitiers actually meant that the economic, scientific, and cultural levels that Europeans attained in the thirteenth century could almost certainly have been achieved more than three centuries earlier had they been included in the Muslim world empire.

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia - that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone.

The Europeans must now honor their commitments. That is the position that France is defending.

I enjoy bathing, as many Europeans don't.

Plastic waste is undeniably a big issue, and Europeans need to act together to tackle this problem because plastic waste ends up in our air, our soil, our oceans, and in our food.

I lived at the Gramercy Park Hotel for about 10 years. It was terrific. It was a pleasantly run-down hotel of the '70s and '80s with a mix of older, rent-controlled apartment dwellers, Europeans and new wave and punk bands. The room service was great, the hamburger was terrific, and they had a doctor who made house calls.

Europeans are much more serious than we are in America because they think that a good place to discuss intellectual matters is a beer party.

I think that Americans, they love comfort more than Europeans. Americans created the T-shirt, the sweat pants, and they create the best sporting shoes.

Europeans ridicule Muslim culture because they don't understand the wisdom behind it. Take swine flu for instance: all the sudden you've got Europeans scared of pigs - we've been saying that for years!