Regardless, we knew she’d want us to come back to Europe and go for the gold. While it was shocking when it happened, at the same time we knew what we had to do.

Modern Existentialism… is a total European creation, perhaps the last philosophic legacy of Europe to America or whatever other civilization is now on its way to supplant Europe.

Wie ich heimschritt bemerkte ich mit einemmal vor mir meinen eigenen Schatten so wie ich den Schatten des anderen Krieges hinter dem jetzigen sah. Er ist durch all diese Zeit nicht mehr von mir gewichen dieser Schatten er überhing jeden meiner Gedanken bei Tag und bei Nacht vielleicht liegt sein dunkler Umriß auch auf manchen...

It wasn’t my choice to write this story…it was my responsibility.

Tommy Wirkola is Norwegian but has a Finnish surname – he comes from the one of the northernmost countries in the whole of Europe. It was easy working with him. The people in the north are all fairly similar.

High Europe always played at ethnic contempt because it was High Europe, and so had the strength, the authority, to make the racial rules. We great unwashed of the outer world, on the coasts of new continents, though we might ourselves have behaved atrociously to indigenes, were baffled by the determination with which Europe returned...

Every few months, I find myself in Europe or the Middle East.

If the people of Europe had known as much of astronomy and geology when the bible was introduced among them, as they do now, there never could have been one believer in the doctrine of inspiration. If the writers of the various parts of the bible had known as much about the sciences as is...

another important step toward making Europe whole and free.

Europeans would like to escape from their history, a “great” history written in letters of blood. But others, by the hundreds of millions, are taking it up for the first time, or coming back to it.

Oh yeah, our first tour in Europe they wouldn’t give me the time off from work.

Earnings growth is still improving and Europe has the advantage to be late relative to the US economic cycle.

Middle Passage,” as it was called by European slavers, was notorious for the number of deaths incurred, averaging in the vicinity of 15-20 per cent. There were also numerous deaths in Africa between time of capture and time of embarkation, especially in cases where captives had to travel hundreds of miles to the coast. Most...

From the beginning, Europe assumed the power to make decisions within the international trading system. An excellent illustration of that is the fact that the so-called international law which governed the conduct of nations on the high seas was nothing else but European law. Africans did not participate in its making, and in many instances,...

We need to be aware that there’s a real risk for Europe when the birds migrate northwards this spring.

Europeans have sometimes been beguiled by a despotism that comes concealed in the seductive form of an ideal – as it did in the cases of Hitler and Stalin. This fact may remind us that the possibility of despotism is remote neither in space nor in time.

Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest.

Well, I first started going to Europe in the late ’70s.

Let me tell you who those bad guys are. They’re us. WE BE BAD. We’re the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We’re three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother’s side. You take your Germany, France, and Spain, roll them all together...

British chancellor is telling the rest of Europe it must abandon democracy. It’s appalling.

There are 20 million unemployed and what does the Constitution offer us in the Europe of 25, 27 and soon to be 30: policies of unrestricted competition to the detriment of production, wages, research and innovation.

Europe must dissipate any doubts over the euro, affirm that the euro is an irreversible project and act in consequence.

Lies Have expiry dates but the truth never expires

Democracy suits Europeans today partly because it is associated with the triumph of capitalism and partly because it involves less commitment or intrusion into their lives than any of the alternatives. Europeans accept democracy because they no longer believe in politics. It is for this reason that we find both high levels of support for...

…habían sido objeto de revueltas políticas, violentas disputas con sus vecinos y finalmente de invasión por una de las nuevas superpotencias mundiales. En medio de todo esto, odiar a un adversario se convirtió en algo completamente natural.

I’ll pretty much try any cheese, but I have found that I prefer young goats and old cows. I don’t like gray areas.

We are so accustomed to thinking of European civilization as the vanguard of the world that we forget that for much of human history, the European peninsula was at the receiving end of the miracles of the East. Over the millennia, innovations such as Mesopotamian agriculture, the Phoenician alphabet, Greek philosophy, and Arab bookkeeping all...

Whereas once medieval Europe had adhered to a common Catholic religion, a common Latin language, and common well-spiced cuisine (at least, for the elite), the balkanization of the Christian world along national lines now meant that nations could no longer gather around the same table as easily as before. Even though it would take some...

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.[Letter objecting to the use of government land for churches, 1803]

I sketched North America onto my crude and now crowded map, and Hao was astounded to learn that it was not a piece of Europe, as he had always assumed.

We can prevent Europe from becoming a spiritless machine that, in the end, grinds to a halt.

A historic transition is occurring, barely noticed. Slowly, quietly, imperceptibly, religion is shriveling in America, as it has done in Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan and other advanced societies. Supernatural faith increasingly belongs to the Third World. The First World is entering the long-predicted Secular Age, when science and knowledge dominate. The change promises to be...

Far from being Eurocentric, my analysis “exoticizes” Europe. Europe is historically aberrant. In some ways this was a historical accident, not entirely Europe’s fault. But, in any case, it is nothing about which Europe should boast. Perhaps Europe and the world will one day be cured of this terrible malady with which Europe (and through...

If Nord Stream was built in Europe, I see no reason why South Stream cannot be built as well.

There can be no unified southeastern Europe without Yugoslavia, and everything else is a continuation of political blackmail with which the Serb people and Yugoslavia were faced all these years.

I folded my map in half and used it to make a sandwich. Then I dipped it in coffee and ate all of Europe and half of Russia.

It was a heavenly summer, the summer in which France fell and the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk. Leaves were never such an intense and iridescent green; sunlight glinted on flower-studded meadows as the Germans encircled the Maginot Line and overran not only France but Belgium and Holland. Birdsong filled the air in...

I’d much rather watch football than football.” But I’m just teasing them, and they know I’d really rather watch football than football.

We can recognize and give credit where credit is due, to the debt of taste we owe Europe, but we have taste, too.

Having confronted the world with little except a battered typewriter and a certain resilience, he can now take posthumous credit for having got the three great questions of the 20th century essentially ‘right.’ Orwell was an early and consistent foe of European imperialism, and foresaw the end of colonial rule. He was one of the...

Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just ‘the occupation’ but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the...

I don’t really know how it feels for an American to go to Mexico, but if you come from Germany, Mexico is a really exotic place. It has this laid back vibe, at least in the countryside, and things don’t seem to be as over-civilized as they are here in Europe.

Historians don’t really like to carry on speculative debates, but you could certainly argue that the likelihood of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe was extremely, extremely low.

Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and, above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso — who subsequently kept African art objects in his...

After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo, Europeans had created nation-states in the image and likeness of Napoleon. The new states became the foci of popular affection, even worship. All organized themselves as Napoleon had France, and as Hegel had prescribed, with every house numbered so that bureaucratic government could pass its science to and collect...

Bulgaria, I reflected as I walked back to the hotel, isn’t a country; it’s a near-death experience.

We think ourselves possessed, or at least we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact. There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a...

To be in Florence is to reflect on Europe’s intricate diversity – and its lost creativity.

Asia is an entertainment, Europe is a dream, America is an imprisonment and Rest is a nightmare.

There are some great divers in Europe and I’m really excited about going to Eindhoven.