Europe

Europe is one of the traditional seven political continents, and a peninsular sub-continent of the geographic continent Eurasia.

Divisions of Europe

• I have ever deemed it fundamental for the United States never to take active part in the quarrels of Europe. Their political interests are entirely distinct from ours... They are nations of eternal war.
  • Thomas Jefferson

• Whoever lights the torch of war in Europe can wish for nothing but chaos.
  • Adolf Hitler

• You know what the funniest thing about Europe is? It’s the little differences.
  • Quentin Tarantino

• A war between Europeans is a civil war.
  • Victor Hugo

• That grand drama in a hundred acts, which is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe—the most terrible, most questionable and perhaps also the most hopeful of all dramas.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche

• I doubt that the evil spirits of the past, under which we in Europe have already suffered more than enough this century, have been banished for ever.
  • Helmut Kohl

Europe as a declining continent

• There is no freedom in Europe - that's certain - it is besides a worn out portion of the globe.
  • Lord Byron

• Soon nostalgia will be another name for Europe.
  • Angela Carter (1940–1992), British postmodern novelist. repr. Vintage (1992). Expletives Deleted, review of John Berger, Once in Europa, The Washington Post (1989).

• I am worn down, and worn out, with crusading and defending Europe, and protecting mankind; I must think a little of myself.
  • Sydney Smith

• Positively I sit here, and look at Europe sink, first one deck disappearing, then another, and the whole ship slowly plunging bow-down into the abyss; until the nightmare gets to be howling. The Roman Empire was a trifle to it.
  • Henry Brooks Adams

• The more I live here in western Europe, the more I am impressed by the sense of decay;not the graceful and dignified decay of an oriental, but the vulgar and sordid decay of a bankrupt cotton-mill.
  • Henry Brooks Adams

• The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities.
  • Antonin Artaud

• I have no more patience for this Europe where Autumn wears the face of Spring and Spring reeks of misery.
  • Albert Camus

• Let us rejoice, indeed, at having witnessed the death of a lying and comfort-loving Europe and at being faced with cruel truths.
  • Albert Camus

• Over there, in Europe, all was shame and anger. Here it was exile or solitude, among these languid and agitated madmen who danced in order to die.
  • Albert Camus

Unification of Europe

• One day, on the model of the United States of America, a United States of Europe will come into being.
  • George Washington writing to Marquis de La Fayette

• That in order to achieve the triumph of liberty, justice and peace in the international relations of Europe, and to render civil war impossible among the various peoples which make up the European family, only a single course lies open: to constitute the United States of Europe
  • Mikhail Bakunin

• L'Europe est un Etat composé de plusieurs provinces.
  • Translation: Europe is a state with several provinces.
  • Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu

• The Federated Republic of Europe—the United States of Europe—that is what must be. National autonomy no longer suffices. Economic evolution demands the abolition of national frontiers. If Europe is to remain split into national groups, then Imperialism will recommence its work. Only a Federated Republic of Europe can give peace to the world.
  • Leon Trotsky

• If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European.
  • James Joyce

• Whatever else may divide us, Europe is our common home; a common fate has linked us through the centuries, and it continues to link us today.
  • Leonid Brezhnev

• We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.
  • Winston Churchill February 14, 1948.

• Why should there not be a European group which could give a sense of enlarged patriotism and common citizenship to the distracted peoples of this turbulent and mighty continent? And why should it not take its rightful place with other great groupings and help to shape the onward destinies of men?
  • Winston Churchill 19.9.1946

• If Europe were once united in the sharing of its common inheritance there would be no limit to the happiness, the prosperity, and the glory which its 300,000,000 or 400,000,000 people would enjoy.
  • Winston Churchill

• My revenge is fraternity! No more frontiers! The Rhine for everyone! Let us be the same Republic, let us be the United States of Europe, let us be the continental federation, let us be European liberty, let us be universal peace!
  • Victor Hugo August 21, 1849 in Paris in his opening Address to the Peace Congress.

• A day will come when all nations on our continent will form a European brotherhood... A day will come when we shall see... the United States of America and the United States of Europe face to face, reaching out for each other across the seas.
  • Victor Hugo

• Europe thus divided into nationalities freely formed and free internally, peace between States would have become easier: the United States of Europe would become a possibility.
  • Napoleon

• The ocean is rough and whirling, and the currents go to two possible endings: the autocrat, or the United States of Europe'.
  • Carlo Cattaneo

• Does this boat go to Europe, France?
  • Anita Loos

Politics of Europe

• A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.
  • the Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx

• When Paris sneezes, Europe catches cold.
  • Metternich

Definitions of Europe by geography or culture

• So there is no single European people. There is no single all-embracing community of culture and tradition among, say, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Berlin and Belgrade. In fact, there are at least four communities: the Northern Protestant, the Latin Catholic, the Greek Orthodox, and the Muslim Ottoman. There is no single language - there are more than twenty. (...) There are no real European political parties (...). And most significantly of all: unlike the United States, Europe still does not have a common story.
  • Geert Mak, Europe as a cultural project, 2005

• Europe is not really even a geographic entity; it is separated from Asia only at one point, the Bosphorus, by a small stretch of water. North of that there is continuity over the russians steppes, a complete terrestrial flow. I suggest that is also true of culture, and indeed of social organization. Indeed Europe has never been purely isolated, purely Christian. Instead of Christian Europe, one has to see the continent as penetrated by the three world religions that originated in the Near East and which indeed had a common mythology or sacred text; in order of arrival these were Judaism, Christianity and Islam. (...) All have equal entitlements to be present, and in this general ('objective') sense none can be considered only as the Other; they are part of Europe, part of our heritage.
  • Jack Goody, Islam in Europe, Polity, 2004, p.14

• As to the territorial limits of Europe, they may seem relatively clear on its seaward flanks, but many island groups far to the north and west—Svalbard, the Faroes, Iceland, and the Madeira and Canary islands—are considered European, while Greenland (though tied politically to Denmark) is conventionally allocated to North America. Furthermore, the Mediterranean coastlands of North Africa and southwestern Asia also exhibit some European physical and cultural affinities. Turkey and Cyprus in particular, while geologically Asian, possess elements of European culture and may be regarded as parts of Europe.
  • Encyclopædia Britannica, Europe

• The peoples of Europe are a work in progress and always must be... The history of the people of Europe has not ended -- it never will. Ethnogenesis is a process of the present and future as much as it is the past. No efforts of romantics, politicians, or social scientists can preserve once and for all some essential soul of a people or nation. Nor can any effort ensure that nations, ethnic groups, and communities of today will not vanish utterly in the future. The past may have set the parameters within which one can build the future, but it cannot determine what that future must be.
  • Patrick J. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe, Princeton University Press, 2003

• Oui, c'est l'Europe, depuis l'Atlantique jusqu'à l'Oural, c'est l'Europe, c'est toute l'Europe, qui décidera du destin du monde!
  • Translation: Yes, it is Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, it is Europe, it is the whole of Europe, that will decide the fate of the world.
  • Charles de Gaulle, 23 November 1959, Strasbourg.

• Whoever speaks of Europe is wrong: it is a geographical expression.
  • Otto Von Bismarck, speech to Reichstag, 14 May 1872

• Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
  • Aldous Huxley

• If you live in Europe... things change... but continuity never seems to break. You don't have to throw the past away.
  • Nadine Gordimer

• Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life’s possibilities.
  • James Baldwin

• As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche

• Two principles, according to the Settembrinian cosmogony, were in perpetual conflict for possession of the world: force and justice, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge; the law of permanence and the law of change, of ceaseless fermentation issuing in progress. One might call the first the Asiatic, the second the European principle.
  • Thomas Mann

• Purity of race does not exist. Europe is a continent of energetic mongrels.
  • Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher, A history of Europe, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1939, p.14

• I know that Europe’s wonderful, yet something seems to lack; The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back.
  • Henry Van Dyke

• Hey, this is Europe. We took it from nobody; we won it from the bare soil that the ice left. The bones of our ancestors, and the stones of their works, are everywhere. Our liberties were won in wars and revolutions so terrible that we do not fear our governors: they fear us. Our children giggle and eat ice-cream in the palaces of past rulers. We snap our fingers at kings. We laugh at popes. When we have built up tyrants, we have brought them down. And we have nuclear *fucking* weapons.
  • Ken Macleod

• Africa north of the Sahara, from a zoological point of view, is now, and has been since early Tertiary times, a part of Europe. This is true both of animals and of the races of man.
  • Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, Scribner's sons, 1916, p.137

Europe and the World

• If I knew something useful to my country and harmful to Europe, or useful to Europe and harmful to the human race, I should consider it a crime.
  • Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu

• The immense popularity of American movies abroad demonstrates that Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.
  • Mary McCarthy

• I've come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
  • Don Delillo

• It is a complex fate, being an American, and one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious evaluation of Europe.
  • Henry James

• Europe cannot confine itself to the cultivation of its own garden.
  • Juan Carlos of Spain

• In America the cohesion was a matter of choice and will. But in Europe it was organic.
  • D. H. Lawrence

• The time to enjoy a European tour is about three weeks after you unpack.
  • George Ade

• Until now when we have started to talk about the uniqueness of America we have almost always ended by comparing ourselves to Europe. Toward her we have felt all the attraction and repulsions of Oedipus.
  • Daniel J Boorstin

Reaction to European Constitution

• "The EU Constitution is something new in human history. Though it is not as eloquent as the French and U.S. constitutions, it is the first governing document of its kind to expand the human franchise to the level of global consciousness. The language throughout the draft constitution speaks of universalism, making it clear that its focus is not a people, or a territory, or a nation, but rather the human race and the planet we inhabit."
  • Jeremy Rifkin in Utne, 24 October 2004

• “[The Constitution] will seal the victory of the nation-states over the European 'super-state'".
  • Le Figaro (France), 21 April 2004

• "The EU Constitution safeguards national sovereignty of Member States."
  • Guilherme Oliveira Martins (Portugese Socialist MP), 19 June 2004

• "This is a Constitution … which consecrates the EU as a union of sovereign states, which continues not to opt for federal institutions."
  • El Mundo (Spain), 20 June 2004

• "This Constitution does not reflect the thoughts, hopes and aspirations of ordinary people. It does nothing for jobs or economic growth and widens further still the democratic deficit. The gap between the governors and the governed is now a gaping chasm."
  • Nigel Farage (Leader of UK Independence Party), 24 September 2003

• "A consensus [that] has been established … around the British concept of a market system stretching from the Atlantic to the Urals, accompanied by intergovernmental co-operation in areas where collective action is more efficient, and a security policy integrated with that of the USA."
  • Nicolas Baverez (French commentator and author), 2003

• "There is no place for concern that it would change the structure and operation of the EU in a radical way. 90% of the constitution agreement is already in the current agreements. The innovations in the draft will clarify the structure of the EU and make its activity more efficient, as well as strengthen citizens’ rights."
  • Egils Levits (Latvian ECJ Judge), Quoted in “Latvijas avize”, 21 June 2004

• "Europe is and will be a Union of States."
  • Jose Louis Zapatero (Prime Minister of Spain), Speech to Spanish Cortes, 15 June 2004

• "The British won the day."
  • Corriere della Sera (Italy), 19 Jun 2004

• "An extraordinary disappointment."
  • Elmar Brok MEP (German federalist), Economist, 31 May 2003

• "I want to kill myself."
  • Giuliano Amato (Italian federalist),Telegraph, 24 May 2003