Quotes About Europe

We cannot possibly overstate the importance of the Christian Church for its role in preserving, defending, and, ultimately, re-civilizing Europe.

Later, she confessed that ego and prestige played a part; that she loved to possess, to amass. "It is not love of art," she admitted, in part facetiously. "It is voracity. I am a glutton." Her agents continued to buy everything available of beauty and value. During her reign, Catherine's collection expanded to almost four thousand paintings. She became the greatest collector and patron of art in the history of Europe.

General History of Germany

She was fourteen and he was thirty-two, and this was the first and only meeting of these two remarkable monarchs. Both would eventually be accorded the title "the Great." And between them, for decades, they would dominate the history of central and eastern Europe.

Peter returned to Russia determined to remold his country along Western lines. The old Muscovite state, isolated and introverted for centuries, would reach out to Europe and open itself to Europe. In a sense, the flow of effect was circular: the West affected Peter, the Tsar had a powerful impact upon Russia, and Russia, modernized and emergent, had a new and greater influence on Europe. For all three, therefore—Peter, Russia and Europe—the Great Embassy was a turning point.

That is why Russian penetration of the political systems of the United States and Europe has been so effective. It has exploited the truly dangerous fissures in Western society, which are not based on class, as the Marxists wanted to believe, but on tribe and culture.

Many were surprised at the British vote to leave the European Union, but from a historical perspective there was nothing unusual about the English seeking distance from the continent.

Little boy and little girl.I don't know how old. Sweetest family in the world, of you listen to the old folks around here." Xander was stunned. "And nobody knows what happened to them?" "Some say they high-tailed it to Europe." She raised her eyebrows at him. "Most believe he took them somewhere and killed them. Then took his own life." Dad forced a smile. "Just old rumors," he said.

The identity and infrastructure of the nations of Europe had to be rebuilt, and the restitution of artwork was a vital component.

As part of a clandestine advance guard, their route was perilously unprotected. Lucas was glad to have Toussaint watching his back. Soldiering was in the private's blood, but it wasn't in Lucas's. He'd been diverted from the infantry into the CRC, the Cultural Recovery Commission, a minuscule cadre of experts in art and architecture, recruited and dispatched to find, preserve, and protect the treasures that the Nazis had looted so far in their conquest of Europe. In

The hot money flowed into Europe and today once rich and powerful nations like Ireland, Greece, Italy, and Spain are financial basket cases that may not recover.

is now generally accepted that these issues were subordinate to the fact that Germany had been planning a European war for a long time and seized on the Balkan issue in 1914 as the excuse to provoke one.

When King Edward's charm and influence defused six centuries of Anglo-French rivalry and led to the signing of the Entente Cordiale in 1904, the Kaiser saw this as yet another cunning British attempt to unite Europe against Germany.

The general feeling among the Entente nations at the end of 1916 seemed to be that unless Europe returned to the status quo ante, the terrible loss of life in the previous three years had been for nothing.

Peace negotiations began, or were at least initiated, almost as soon as the war began, but by 1915 they had led nowhere. The nations of Europe were not yet sick of killing and at the end of 1915 there was no doubt in anyone's mind that the fighting would go on.

In any event, there was no "fall" into "Dark Ages." Instead, once freed of the bondage of Rome, Europe separated into hundreds of independent "statelets."16 In many of these societies progress and increased production became profitable, and that ushered in "one of the great innovative eras of mankind," as technology was developed and put into use "on a scale no civilization had previously known.

For example, at the fall of Rome there was very extensive slavery everywhere in Europe; by the time of the "Renaissance" it was long gone.

So much, then, for the "mystery" of how Muslim culture was somehow lost or left behind. The notion that in the medieval era Islamic culture was advanced well beyond Europe is as much an illusion as recent ones about an "Arab Spring." The Islamic world was backward then, and so it remains.

By the late twelfth century Europe was so crowded with windmills that owners began to file lawsuits against one another for blocking their wind.

As the historian Edward Grant explained, 'It is indisputable that modern science emerged in the seventeenth century in Western Europe and nowhere else'. ... The crucial question is: Why? My answer to this question is as brief as it is unoriginal: Christianity depicted God as a rational, responsive, dependable, and omnipotent being and the universe as his personal creation, thus having a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting human comprehension.

Christianity became a European faith because Europe was the only "continent where it was not destroyed."44

By the seventh century, Christianity probably was far stronger and more sophisticated in North Africa and Asia than in Europe.

Today, little has changed in European religious life. State churches still dominate all of Europe's 'Protestant' nations, with the negative consequences that will be seen in the next chapter. Church attendance remains low everywhere. And magic is still widely embraced!

that there was no scientific revolution, only the culmination of normal scientific progress over several centuries and, moreover, that science arose only in Christian Europe because only medieval Europeans believed that science was possible and desirable.