European Integration Quotes

Perhaps our own opposition to even the level of European integration we have now, let alone any more, is well known. ~ Nigel Farage

Czech Republic is an important part of central Europe. It's clear that we must participate in European integration. I am convinced that the Czech Republic - or, in the past, Czechoslovakia - would have been one of the founding members of the EU if it hadn't been for the communist takeover in 1948. ~ Vaclav Klaus

We are involved in a constitution-building process of historic importance. The Convention should mark a new stage in European integration. ~ Romano Prodi

The future will belong to the Germans ... when we build the House of Europe. In the next two years, we will make the process of European integration irreversible. This is a really big battle but it is worth the fight. ~ Helmut Kohl

All of us, the government, parliament, local authorities and the society must demonstrate determination and readiness to use knowledge and capabilities ... toward full European integration. ~ Igor Luksic

I aim to help the Germans and the Europeans successfully travel all the way down the path toward European integration, and I can do this more effectively if I don't commit myself to a party. ~ Hans-Werner Sinn

Slovenia wishes that Montenegro will continue successfully its way towards European integration and will reach peaceful co-habitation with other former Yugoslav peoples within a united Europe. ~ Janez Drnovsek

For many years prior to the 1990s, European integration was embraced and supported by a large majority of citizens. A united Europe, bound by commonly-held democratic values, was perceived as an essential and effective buffer against the Soviet empire. A united Europe made a repeat of the First and Second World Wars almost unthinkable. ~ Klaus Schwab

What is the role of intellectuals in Europe? There's this debate in which all speakers do not appear to me to even be intellectuals. Why is Martin Sommers an intellectual? It is a political journalist who writes mediocre pieces. If that is sufficient to call yourself a 'European intellectual then the question of the debate has already become rhetorical. ~ Martijn Benders

As Turkish entrepreneurs perform well in Iraq, the Iraqis will have more confidence in Turkish contractors than in some European company they do not know. ~ Husnu Ozyegin

Lack of courage or means often deters the European woman from more independent business activity, and this in spite of increasing freedom to choose her occupation, in spite of brilliant examples of successful undertakings of women, in photography, hotel or boarding-house management, dress-making, etc. ~ Ellen Key

All worship is contextual, but there may be an underlying assumption of European American primacy in worship and the failure to recognize the captivity of the church to European American norms. ~ Soong-Chan Rah

The integration of exponentially growing technologies is beginning to empower the patient, enable the doctor, enhance wellness and begin to cure the well before they get sick. ~ Daniel Kraft

This is an exception of history, Romania. These are a group of Romans that more than 2000 years ago remained here. They have been contaminated from many different cultures, but the basic language is still the Vulgar Latin that was probably spoken 2000 years ago in Rome, with some integration from the Turkish and Slavic languages. The structure is Latin and they still use some expressions that we use in our dialect in Rome. This was impressive for me and helped me a lot to stay here. ~ Anonymous

So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the greatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Language as a Prison

The Philippines did have a written language before the Spanish colonists arrived, contrary to what many of those colonists subsequently claimed. However, it was a language that some theorists believe was mainly used as a mnemonic device for epic poems. There was simply no need for a European-style written language in a decentralized land of small seaside fishing villages that were largely self-sufficient.

One theory regarding language is that it is primarily a useful tool born out of a need for control. In this theory written language was needed once top-down administration of small towns and villages came into being. Once there were bosses there arose a need for written language. The rise of the great metropolises of Ur and Babylon made a common written language an absolute necessity - but it was only a tool for the administrators. Administrators and rulers needed to keep records and know names - who had rented which plot of land, how many crops did they sell, how many fish did they catch, how many children do they have, how many water buffalo? More important, how much then do they owe me? In this account of the rise of written language, naming and accounting seem to be language's primary "civilizing" function. Language and number are also handy for keeping track of the movement of heavenly bodies, crop yields, and flood cycles. Naturally, a version of local oral languages was eventually translated into symbols as well, and nonadmi ~ David Byrne

In 1790, the average age of first menstruation for European girls was just about eighteen, almost fifty percent older than today. ~ Howard Means

In New York, the European starling - now a ubiquitous avian pest from Alaska to Mexico - was introduced because someone thought the city would be more cultured if Central Park were home to each bird mentioned in Shakespeare. ~ Alan Weisman

If you go to Africa and you're white, you're probably not going to get that much work either. But the fact is that there is a longer history of black integration in the U.S. I don't have any resentment about this: I did the maths, calculated it against my ambition and decided to leave England. ~ Idris Elba

The institutions of the European Union, and the states that belong to this union, each and every one, are paying the price of our failures, hesitations and contradictions. We should each ask ourselves how personally responsible we are. ~ Giorgio Napolitano

First I was a European-style player, then I was a downtown 'noise guy,' and now some people call me an Americana guy. ~ Bill Frisell

After winning the European Championship with Spain, I know exactly how it feels to win a major trophy, and I know that, if we can win at Liverpool, it will feel the same or even better than it did with Spain. ~ Fernando Torres

In Paul Friedrich's book Proto-Indo-European Trees he identifies the "semantic primitives" of the Indo-European tribe of languages through a group of words that have not changed much through twelve thousand years - and those are tree names: especially birch, willow, adler, elm, ash, apple and beech (bher, wyt, alysos, ulmo, os, abul, bhago). Seed syllables, bija, of the life of the west. ~ Gary Snyder

These values are 'distinctly European' because they were thought out, articulated and refined in the part of the planet that tends to be described as 'Europe proper', and their articulation and refinement cannot be separated from the course of Europe's history. ~ Zygmunt Bauman

We must go back to teach Europeans to love Europe. ~ Jean-Claude Juncker

My parents are European immigrants. And I think as Europeans there are so many languages in close proximity that it's part of the culture to try to learn at least one other language. So my parents really encourage it in the house. Chinese would be really great to learn - like Mandarin or Cantonese. Portuguese would be incredible. ~ Stana Katic

Jazz came out of New Orleans, and that was the forerunner of everything. You mix jazz with European rhythms, and that's rock n' roll, really. You can make the argument that it all started on the streets of New Orleans with the jazz funerals. ~ The Edge

Educating Lawyers succeeds admirably in describing the educational programs at virtually every American law school. The call for the integration of the three apprenticeships seems to me exactly what is needed to make legal education more professional, to prepare law students better for the practice of law, and to address societal expectations of lawyers. ~ Stephen Wizner

Unlike babies, phenomena are typically born long before humans give them names. Zurara did not call Black people a race. French poet Jacques de Brézé first used the term "race" in a 1481 hunting poem. In 1606, the same diplomat who brought the addictive tobacco plant to France formally defined race for the first time in a major European dictionary, "Race…means descent," Jean Nicot wrote in the Trésor de la langue française. "Therefore, it is said that a man, a hors, a dog or another animal is from a good or bad race." From the beginning, to make races was to make racial hierarchy.

Gomes de Zurara grouped all those peoples from Africa into a single race for that very reason: to create hierarchy, the first racist idea. Race making is an essential ingredient in the making of racist ideas, the crust that holds the pie. Once a race has been created it must be filled in-and Zurara filled it with negative qualities that would justify Prince Henry's evangelical mission to the world. This Black race of people was lost, living "like beasts, without any custom of reasonable beings, " Zurara wrote. "They had no understanding of good, but only knew how to live in a bestial sloth. ~ Ibram X. Kendi

I'm not a lukewarm European. I know that the German-French friendship is indispensable, no matter who the countries' leaders are. ~ Francois Hollande

Nature laughs at the difficulties of integration. ~ Pierre-Simon Laplace

The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability. This could be achieved when the German steel barons were forced to deal with and to receive socially Hitler's the housepainter and self-admitted former derelict, as it could be with the crude and vulgar forgeries perpetrated by the totalitarian movements in all fields of intellectual life, insofar as they gathered all the subterranean, nonrespectable elements of European history into one consistent picture. From this viewpoint it was rather gratifying to see that Bolshevism and Nazism began even to eliminate those sources of their own ideologies which had already won some recognition in academic or other official quarters. Not Marx's dialectical materialism, but the conspiracy of 300 families; not the pompous scientificality of Gobineau and Chamberlain, but the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"; not the traceable influence of the Catholic Church and the role played by anti-clericalism in Latin countries, but the backstairs literature about the Jesuits and the Freemasons became the inspiration for the rewriters of history. The object of the most varied and variable constructions was always to reveal history as a joke, to demonstrate a sphere of secret influences of which the visible, traceable, and known historical reality was only the outward façade erected explicitly to fool the people.

To this aversion of the ~ Hannah Arendt

A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after - and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys. ~ T. S. Eliot

I think the facts reveal that the European partners have taken extraordinary measures to help Greece address its problems. ~ Lucas Papademos

I think that what's so interesting about her is that she took to an extreme her embrace of peasant life even though she was a singing and dancing European intellectual. ~ Tom Jaine

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 I. Brezhnev

When a Mannerist artist breaks rules he does so on the basis of knowledge and not of ignorance. A considerable amount of North European architecture of the sixteenth century must be excluded for these reasons. ~ John Shearman

Whatever greatness Lincoln achieved cannot be explained as a triumph over personal suffering. Rather, it must be accounted for as an outgrowth of the same system that produced that suffering. This is not a story of transformation but one of integration. Lincoln didn't do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy. The problem of his melancholy was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work. ~ Joshua Wolf Shenk