Quotes About Europe

Nevertheless, the movement of intelligence over western and southern Europe was as rapid in Caesar's day as at any time before the railway. In 54 B.C.. Caesar's letter from Britain reached Cicero at Rome in twenty-nine days; in 1834 Sir Robert Peel, hurrying from Rome to London, required thirty days.20

the decline of religious belief,which has all sorts of effects on morals and even on politics because religion has been a tool of politics. But today in Europe it ceases to be a tool, it has very little influence in determining political decisions—

If you look at a map of Europe you will observe that Greece is a skeleton-like hand stretching its crooked fingers out into the Mediterranean Sea.

All those fascinating varieties of terrain—mountains and valleys, fiords and straits, gulfs and streams—that make Europe a panorama of diverse delight, have broken the population of a minor continent into a score of peoples cherishing their differences, and self-imprisoned in their heritage of hate.

Egyptian engineering was superior to anything known to the Greeks or Romans, or to Europe before the Industrial Revolution;

The Classics, it is the Classics! & not Goths nor Monks, that Desolate Europe with Wars.

Ich bin für gute Unterhaltung, feuchtfröhliche Abende, Intimität, vins rouges en carafe, Lesen, relative Einsamkeit, Straßenbekanntschaften … Ich bin für die europäischen Verworrenheiten, die unergründlichen und mannigfachen Schichtungen der Alten Welt, für den Norden, für die Welt der Gedanken. Ich bin für das Hôtel de la Louisiane.

I asked him, What do you do? He smiled patiently, The typical American question. In Europe they would ask, What are you doing? Or, What are you doing now? What do I do? I listen, to the water falling. (No sound of it here but with the wind!) This is my entire occupation.

The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and European imperialism have very often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of both faiths have needed each other to reinforce each other's prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the other.

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe. (on Mark Twain)

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, being an artist is an excuse for a form of behavior.

In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.

Free trade and Christianity, it's the German East Africa Company, it's French Equatorial Africa, it's the Belgians cutting down the Congo population from twenty million to ten in barely twenty years, by nineteen fourteen there's nothing left to plunder in Africa so they go to war with each other in Europe instead that's what the whole damned first world war was all ab...

Why were these giant projects so relatively common in Europe? He'd grown up with the unquestioned assumption that America was the home of heroic infrastructure, but was it, now? He didn't think so. How did they pay for these things here? Taxes?

DOC    Yes, you want to study hard, Marie, learn to be a fine artist some day. Paint lots of beautiful pictures. I remember a picture my mother had over the mantelpiece at home, a picture of a cathedral in a sunset, one of those big cathedrals in Europe somewhere. Made you feel religious just to look at it.

1948 President Truman signs legislation establishing the Marshall Plan.

Struck by the ugliness of the German women on the streets and in restaurants and cafés. As a race they are certainly the least attractive in Europe. They have no ankles. They walk badly. They dress worse than English women used to. Off to Danzig tonight.

by the end of the Middle Ages, which had seen Britain and France emerge as unified nations, Germany remained a crazy patchwork of some three hundred individual states. It was this lack of national development which largely determined the course of German history from the end of the Middle Ages to midway in the nineteenth century and made it so different from that of the other great nations of Western Europe.

Surely the Germans must be the ugliest-looking people in Europe, individually. Not a decent-looking woman in the whole Linden. Their awful clothes probably contribute to one's impression.

It was not the same as charging down a machine-gun nest armed only with a Bowie knife, or strapping in to the tail-gunner seat of a four-engined heavy bomber. And no one else would ever know, since one did not get a medal for letting go of a woman's hand on a gray Saturday morning in the middle of a European war. But to have faith—that a lover would be constant and life clement—this did require courage in a city more disposed to beginnings than safe continuations. As

The Confederate States of America were now twice the size of any nation in Europe (Russia excepted), made up of nine million people, including three and a half million slaves. As General Beauregard put it, "No people ever warred for independence with more relative advantages than the Confederates," citing the well-organized central government, existing state governments, mountains, rivers, and other natural defenses.

I come from a small town and I come from a background where we didn't have money to travel. I thought I'd have to join the military to get to Europe. So I'm thrilled to travel.

They were fortunate as I had a couple of unusual mutations in my mtDNA, which makes it very recognizable, but it was still somewhat shocking to find that my DNA had left a contaminating trail across the museums of Europe! As Alan Cooper is jokily fond of accusing paleoanthropologists, in terms of the contamination of fossils he has tried to study, "You are all very dirty people!

Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which was the largest roofed building to be built in Europe until the thirteenth century.