Quotes About Europe

J.K. watches a storm rage into the crimson afternoon. The sky is electric. Rain whips her bare arms and legs. Dustbins are hauled into the air, caught on the wind's curve. Bags and pillowcase unpacked for a while, toothbrush, perfume, books, a little pile of yellow feathers, J.K. knows she too is caught in the wind. She is Europe's eerie child, and she is part of the storm." (from "Swallowing Geography" by Deborah Levy)

I admire Chancellor Merkel for her leadership qualities, but she is leading Europe in the wrong direction.

Once Europe existed in a Dark Age and Islam carried the torch of learning. Now we Muslims live in a Dark age.

the soft weight of Europe pulled over us like a quilt.

The Empire was on the point of turning Paris into the bawdy house of Europe. The gang of fortune-seekers who had succeeded in stealing a throne required a reign of adventures, shady transactions, sold consciences, bought women, and rampant drunkenness.

If the Communists win Europe and a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope.

We need not trouble about the Dutch and Scandinavians who, though belonging broadly to the non-absolutist zone, lived a relatively tranquil life outside the dramatic events of the rest of Europe.

Although European protest marches had focused mainly on the United States for the previous six years, it was the leadership of Western Europe who most strongly opposed creating a world without nuclear weapons.

W przeciwieÅ"stwie do Europejczyków, którzy zachowujÄ… galloromaÅ"skie ruiny w sercu swoich metropolii, lecz zapominaja o Senece i odwiedzajÄ… katedry, cho? odstÄ™pujÄ… od chrzeÅ›cijaÅ"stwa, ChiÅ"czycy nie lokujÄ… swojej kultury w kamieniach. Tutaj przeszÅ'o?? stanowiÅ'a tera?niejszo?? ducha, nie odcisk w skale.

Those new regions [America] which we found and explored with the fleet… we may rightly call a New World… a continent more densely peopled and abounding in animals than our Europe or Asia or Africa; and, in addition, a climate milder than in any other region known to us.

All Americans wrote better in Europe. They crossed the ocean, and every word they wrote was brilliant. "There's someone at my door," Maddy

Absinthe is legal today in Europe, the United States, and many places around the world. Some governments regulate the amount of thujone that may be present in the finished product—this in spite of the fact that many other culinary plants, including sage, are even higher in thujone and aren't regulated at all.

Insane Europeans who plot to cut each others' throats, now that one and the same civilisation enfolds and unites them all!

Modern history, both early and late, was made by Europeans, who "built a world around Europe", as historians "know", according to Braudel. That is indeed the "knowledge" of the European historians who themselves "invented" history and then put it to good use. There is not even an inkling of suspicion that it may have been the other way around, that maybe it was the world that made Europe.

Perhaps humanity should thank Covid-19 for taking the early route through Europe.

There can be no doubt that anti-Americanism has become a kind of litmus test for progressive thinking and identity in Europe and the world (including the United States itself). Just as any self-respecting progressive and leftist in Europe or America, regardless of which political shade, simply had to be on the side of the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, antiAmericanism and anti-Zionism have become the requisite proof of possessing a progressive conviction today.

Thus, for example, an article in the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel proclaims that this women's soccer has nothing to do with sports—a standard European reaction to women's soccer in America.47 "Typically American" were the first two words in the introduction to the article, so that the reader would know right away what to expect.

today's West Europe these two closely related antipathies and resentments are now considered proper etiquette. They are present in polite company and acceptable in the discourse of the political classes.

the West European media report almost nothing that they associate with America in a neutral, matter-of-fact manner. Most things engender a palpable tone of irritation, derision, annoyance, dismissal.

The fact that obesity in both Europe and America is chiefly a class-specific phenomenon—obese people disproportionately inhabit the lower rungs of the social scale on both sides of the Atlantic—appears hardly a matter for reflection and pales in comparison to the ubiquitous mention of the sole culprit: the "Americanization" of European life.

Antipathy and aversion to America thus became a solid component of the elite discourse in Europe long before the United States emerged as a global power.

Because so many Germans came into contact with America and Americans, Germany provided the most productive and widely read authors in Europe dealing with the New World.

The rancor against Europe in American mass public opinion is of a completely different magnitude from anti-Americanism in Europe. In American politics and society, Europe is—if anything—a sporadic and insignificant element of the public discourse.

There never was a "golden age" in which European elites genuinely liked America. To be still more precise, an era never existed in which European intellectuals and literati—European elites—viewed the United States without a solid base of resentment, or better, ressentiment.