Western Europe Quotes

The center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years.

Many people in the United States happen to believe that United States policy is wrong in Vietnam and the Vietcong are correct in wanting to organize their country in their own way politically. This happens to be pretty much the opinion of western Europe and the other parts of the world.

Bloomberg TVThe one thing I think is likely to happen under either candidate is massive fiscal stimulus. You have so many voters in Western Europe and North America who've had no real income growth for over 10 years, and they are, in the words of Howard Beale, "Mad as hell and not going to take it anymore."

To the government, terrorism committed by people who are Muslim is not a reflection on the legitimate interpretation of Islam, even if Islamic supremacist ideology, which endorses jihad violence - Islam, standard, mainstream Islam endorses jihad violence, but our government doesn't want to admit that or deal with it. Here in America, as in Western Europe, this is the key to understand.

We have a high standard of living. ... In Norway, we've tripled our income since 1970. In the rest of western Europe, income has merely doubled.

For the whole of Western Europe, I know the business community quite good.

Now is the time for the U.S. and the nations of Western Europe who engaged in the slave trade throughout this hemisphere to come forward in a positive way to assist in undoing the harm that was caused by their past colonial policies in the hemisphere.

Not since the days of slavery have there been so many people who feel entitled to what other people have produced as there are in the modern welfare state, whether in Western Europe or on this side of the Atlantic.

There is an enormous difference between Russia and Western Europe.

In North America and Western Europe, ten percent of the population of the world consumes fifty percent of its energy.

Today we are in a situation in which the free movement of people can have enormous, monumental dimensions, and I don't think that any country in Western Europe or in America can any longer adopt the idea of totally free movement of people. I t would simply overwhelm their social facilities, their societies and create migratory dynamics on the scales of tens and tens of millions of people. That simply is not practical.

The destination of the soul: this is what I, led on by Nils Holgersson, came to seek in the literature of Western Europe. I fervently hope that my pursuit, as a Japanese, of literature and culture will, in some small measure, repay Western Europe for the light it has shed upon the human condition.

They [leaders in Western Europe] do not misuse financial instruments, financial injections, but, first of all, seek structural change. This is urgent for our economy as well, maybe even more urgent bearing in mind the problem that we cannot yet deal with, namely the prevalence of the oil and gas sector in the Russian Federation and, as a result, dependence on revenue from oil and gas.

Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).

There is a democratic deficit. In Latin America in particular there is real concern that democratic governments are not delivering and that is leading to experimenting with different models that are much less democratic. But even in Western Europe the deficit is a problem.

The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.

In Western Europe and North America some things are better than they were - at least relative to their moral nadirs - such as labour legislation, the opening of the professions to women, intolerance for domestic violence, but so much is still morally unacceptable - the weapons trade, cruel and unusual punishment, economic parasitism.

Shakespeare is, essentially, the emanation of the Renaissance. The overflow of his fame on the Continent in later years was but the sequel of the flood of the Renaissance in Western Europe. He was the child of that great movement, and marks its height as it penetrated the North with civilization.

For fifty years, we heard NATO is necessary to save Western Europe from the Russian hordes, you know the slave state, stuff I was taking about. In 1990-91, no Russian hordes. Okay, what happens? Well there are actually visions of the future system that were presented. One was [Mikhail] Gorbachev. He called for a Eurasian security system, with no military blocs. He called it a Common European Home. No military blocs, no Warsaw Pact. Just an integrated security system with no conflicts.Now the other vision was presented by George Bush, this is the "statesman".

You should not do this, Comrade. We are only in the introductory stage yet, here in Western Europe. And in that stage it is better to encourage the fighters than the rulers.

As long as Muslims cross this red line - if they commit crimes, if they start beating up women, if they start the genital mutilation, if they start to commit other crimes and honour killings as they unfortunately do in Western Europe many times - if they do that, I believe we should expel them, the same day if possible, from our country.

I think that in this globalised world, the local is going to become more and more important - it is a paradox. You see it in Western Europe more and more. Eastern Europe is still coming out of the Soviet uniform cultural era, but this kind of separation and nationalism is very obvious now in Western Europe.

If the estimate of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs is correct, then Russia has lost the cold war in western Europe.

To most people in the UK, indeed throughout Western Europe, space exploration is primarily perceived as 'what NASA does'. This perception is - in many respects - a valid one. Superpower rivalry during the Cold War ramped up US and Soviet space efforts to a scale that Western Europe had no motive to match.

In Western Europe people perish from the congestion and stifling closeness, but with us it is from the spaciousness.... The expanses are so great that the little man hasn't the resources to orient himself.... This is what I think about Russian suicides.

In spite of overwhelming evidence, it is most difficult for a citizen of western Europe to bring thoroughly home to himself the truth that the civilisation which surrounds him is a rare exception in the history of the world.

The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the centralization of state power will be useful for the centralization of the German working class. German predominance would also transfer the center of gravity of the workers' movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 until now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organizationally.

Modern language must be older than the cave paintings and cave engravings and cave sculptures and dance steps in the soft clay in the caves in Western Europe, in the Aurignacian Period some 35,000 years ago, or earlier. I can't believe they did all those things and didn't also have a modern language.

Wealth from trade was the mainspring of Western material advance; the visible agents of change were great guns. These came of age in Europe in the 15th century. On land their potency in reducing castle walls favoured central over local power, since in general only monarchs could afford siege-trains; so nation-states were consolidated and extended into great territorial empires. At sea, guns transformed sailing ships into mobile castles virtually impregnable to opponents who lacked equally powerful ordnance. With the ocean-going gunned warship, western Europe began to extend around the globe.

Marx's own illusion was to think that the working class movement, which he devoted his life to creating and strengthening, would both be socially and politically successful in the industrial nations of Western Europe, and that it would develop an entirely new way of human social life that would retain and even enhance the productive benefits of capitalism while overcoming the inhumanity and exploitation of capitalist social relations. Marx himself had no solutions to these problems. His object of study was capitalism itself.

To defend Western Europe we have to let the Pentagon buy all these tanks and guns and things, and the Pentagon is unable to buy any object that that costs less than a condominium in Vail. If the Pentagon needs, say, fruit, it will argue that it must have fruit that can withstand the rigors of combat conditions, and it will wind up purchasing the FX-700 Seedless Tactical Grape, which will cost $160,000 per bunch, and will have an 83 percent failure rate.

More than any other in Western Europe, Britain remains a country where a traveler has to think twice before indulging in the ordinary food of ordinary people.

They [the Soviets] intend...to induce the Americans to adopt their own 'restructuring' and convergence of the Soviet and American systems using to this end the fear of nuclear conflict.... Convergence will be accompanied by blood baths and political re-education camps in Western Europe and the United States. The Soviet strategists are counting on an economic depression in the United States and intend to introduce their reformed model of socialism with a human face as an alternative to the American system during the depression.

For the last one hundred and fifty years, the history of the House of Rothschild has been to an amazing degree the backstage history of Western Europe...Because of their success in making loans not to individuals but to nations, they reaped huge profits...Someone once said that the wealth of Rothschild consists of the bankruptcy of nations.

Well what would happen is that if Greece defaulted and couldn't pay its debts, all the Greek bonds that are held in other banking systems across Western Europe would suddenly have no value. You could as a knock-on effect create a banking crisis in Western Europe.

The events in Prague, together with the Berlin blockade, convinced the European recipients of American economic assistance that they needed military protection as well: that led them to request the creation of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which committed the United States for the first time ever to the peacetime defense of Western Europe.

To judge from all Communist papers, magazines and brochures, and from all public assemblies, one might even surmise that a revolt of the poor peasants in Western Europe might break out at any moment!

It is one of history's most mocking ironies that the German customs union, which set out to dominate Europe and conquer Britain in the form of Bismarckian or Hitlerian military force, has at last vanquished the victor by drawing Britain into a Zollverein which comprises Western Europe and aspires to comprise the Mediterranean as well. If the ghosts of the Hohenzollerns come back to haunt this planet, they must find a lot to laugh at.

The largest source of greenhouse gases in the coming decades will not be the US, Western Europe and Japan, but the developing economies of East Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. The coming eruption of carbon emissions from the poor world will dwarf any reductions in the North.

The fast growing markets - the BRICS and Next Eleven - are the key. The next billion consumers are not going to come from the US or Western Europe - they are coming from Asia, Latin America and Africa. Formula One follows our strategy: fast growing markets, data, and digital. All those three things Formula One has. And it involves a stunning array of companies. Now that doesn't mean there can't be more.

The aristocracy of Western Europe has absolutely tabooed silver in those countries and driven it away from there. Here it finds its only resting place.

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.

I wonder if those people shown protesting the deployment of nuclear weapons to western Europe during the Reagan era are feeling appropriately stupid today. 'Please don't take away our precious Soviet Union! - We demand the annihilation of all life on Earth!'

No civilisation, not even that of ancient Greece, has ever undergone such a continuous and profound process of change as Western Europe has done during the last 900 years. It is impossible to explain this fact in purely economic terms by a materialistic interpretation of history. The principle of change has been a spiritual one and the progress of Western civilisation is intimately related to the dynamic ethos of Western Christianity, which has gradually made Western man conscious of his moral responsibility and his duty to change the world.

I have absolutely no doubt that there is an intense anti-Americanism in all Western Europe, and I think the reason for that is a very, very simple one.

What does it mean with regard to tactics, this fact that the proletariat of Western Europe stands all alone: that it has no prospect of any help whatsoever from any other class?

Certainly the existence of these huge nuclear force was important for the ultimate confrontation, let's say, over western Europe. You just can't use them to deal with a situation like Afghanistan.

Most of the well-developed world - Australia, Western Europe - they develop their resources base, they inventory it, they develop it, and they view it as a good source of jobs and revenue. We are a country that for too long has taken affordable energy for granted.

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

Today, practically every country outside the West is undergoing an intellectual, political, and cultural churning, from China to Bolivia, Egypt to Indonesia, but we haven't really had, after the 1960s, a major oppositional culture in Western Europe and America. The Occupy movement was so startling and welcome partly because it was the first such eruption of mass protests in decades.