Top 100 European It Quotes
#1. I didn't come from any kind of academic background, but I lived in a college town and I knew people who weren't without pretense. There was this idea in the town that if something was European it would be good.
Sarah Vowell
#2. In Europe life is histrionic and dramatized, and in America, except when it is trying to be European, it is direct and sincere.
William Dean Howells
#3. To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.'
Viktor E. Frankl
#4. LOSER! You English lose ... I suppose he thought it was the most grievous insult he could hurl. But such a curse doesn't really have any effect on an English person - or a European - it seems to me. We know we're all going to lose in the end so it is deprived of any force as a slur.
William Boyd
#5. It would be about as easy for an American to become a Chinaman or a Hindoo as for him to acquire an Englishness or a Frenchness or a European-ness that is more than half skin deep.
Ezra Pound
#6. I think it is important for all those young out there, who someday hope to play real football, where you throw it and kick it and run with it and put it in your hands, a distinction should be made that football is democratic, capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist sport.
Jack Kemp
#7. America is a magical place, and I think my job, or the job of a lot of us European filmmakers is to just hold up America to Americans and present it to you in a new way. All I wanted to do is in a funny way say, "Look at your country. It's magnificent."
Hans Zimmer
#8. Like the rest of the house, it was beautifully appointed with shiny European wallpaper, lavender-scented soap and an oil painting over the toilet. Geoff
Dan Skinner
#9. It's a European Union of economic failure, of mass unemployment and of low growth.
Nigel Farage
#10. Larousse Gastronomique has always been the first and last word on classic European techniques and recipes. I love that it has expanded its reach to cover world cuisines and modern culinary innovations, making it more indispensable than ever.
Marcus Samuelsson
#11. At a European auto show, I had someone from a German car company come up to me and say the Karma should cost $125,000, not $87,900, but our development process lets us lower the costs. I guarantee it's profitable.
Henrik Fisker
#12. I've always liked New York, as I like towns with an edge and New York has a European feel, so when I came to play music here in the '80s it was a surprise to me.
Billy Childish
#13. When Boston and Orlando told me they were going to pick me at 21 and 22, I figured I don't need to do a workout for a second -round team. Boston and Orlando never drafted me because they said I was too skinny and no European point guard will make it in the League.
Tony Parker
#14. Right now I'm living my boyhood dream, which was to play for a European club. The fact that it's a huge club like Barcelona makes it a tremendous honour. I like everything about the city: the climate, the people. It's quite similar to Brazil, which helps a lot. There's even a beach!
Neymar
#15. Bolshevism may be Marxian in theory, but it is Hulagoesque in practice. It may be of European descent, but it is Oriental in tradition. Oriental in mood. Oriental in temperament.
Ameen Rihani
#16. It's not only the British voters who have doubts about European cooperation. There is skepticism in many other E.U. countries.
Mark Rutte
#17. In various European countries, it is increasingly common for young men to live with their parents into their 30s and even longer. Why not? In the welfare state, there is no shame in doing so.
Dennis Prager
#18. But I think that the spirit of protectionism would be the grave of European cinema. You cannot protect something by building a fence around it and thinking that this will help it survive.
Wim Wenders
#19. I think the basic culture of this country is European and Christian and I think that if we lose that, we lost America ... I don't think we should suppress other races, but I think if we lose that White - what's the word for it - that White dominance in America, with it we lose America.
David Duke
#20. Of course, the way writers think about those things is almost certain to be affected by their own cultural background, and it would be hard to deny that, for whatever reasons, a lot of SF writers come from Anglo or European backgrounds.
Stanley Schmidt
#21. A similar statement appears in the US Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report (European War) (30 September 1945): The great lesson to be learned in the battered towns of England and the ruined cities of Germany is that the best way to win a war is to prevent it from occurring.
George C. Marshall
#22. If the 'Athens Spring' - when the Greek people courageously rejected the catastrophic austerity conditions of the previous bailouts - has one lesson to teach, it is that Greece will recover only when the European Union makes the transition from 'We the states' to 'We the European people.'
Yanis Varoufakis
#23. I've always been proud to represent my country, whether it be World Cups, European Championships or just friendly games, I've always been a proud person, I'm very patriotic.
David Beckham
#24. I like everything European. Even my GPS has a British accent - it's way less annoying than the American one.
Rachel Bilson
#25. Sometimes I feel I have more faith in European ideals than some of my British or French friends. For them, it's a financial burden. For me, Europe is primarily about values, about fundamental rights, freedom, women's rights.
Elif Safak
#26. But it is obvious that our fathers, whose efforts have planted these great and prosperous cities along the once lonely trails of our own broad land, received all the fundamentals of civilization as a heritage from their European ancestors.
James Henry Breasted
#27. In wars of the European powers in matters relating to themselves we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy so to do
James Monroe
#28. I can assure you Ernest Hemingway was wrong when he said modern American literature began with Huckleberry Finn. It begins with Moby-Dick, the book that swallowed European civilization whole.
E.L. Doctorow
#29. When we speak of confronting Empire, we need to identify what Empire means. Does it mean the US government (and its European satellites), the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and multinational corporations? Or is it something more than that?
Arundhati Roy
#30. The 1984 European Championships were held in France and that was something important. I felt on form then, even though I was practically always injured at all the World Cups. It's a great memory. But in any case, the past is past.
Michel Patini
#31. When it comes to cyber conflicts between, say, America and China or even a Middle Eastern nation, an African nation, a Latin American nation, a European nation, we have more to lose.
Edward Snowden
#32. I do not see the E.E.C. [European Economic Community] as a great love affair. It's more like nine middle aged couples with failing marriages meeting at a Brussels hotel for a group grope.
Kenneth Tynan
#33. Nationalist, anti-European, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim public political figures, seem a worrying picture of a possible European future. We could still fall back into pre-Europe ... and it worries me.
Tony Judt
#34. Cumbia is a beautiful rhythm. It's a music that has indigenous, African and European components. It's played in all of America - from Argentina to the U.S. It has mutated and been nurtured by everyone who comes across it.
Juan Campodonico
#35. Surprisingly one of the forces for secularisation was Christianity itself. As soon as it accepted the idea of a contrary opinion, the moment that European opinion decided for toleration, it decided for eventual free marketing opinion.
Ibn Warraq
#36. There is a European Central Bank, of course, established and it has the structure similar to the Federal Reserve system, not precisely the same but similar.
Robert C. Solomon
#37. To be sure an European woman would blush to her fingers' ends at the very idea of appearing publicly stark naked; but education and prejudice are everything, since it is an axiom, that where there is no feeling of self-reproach, there can assuredly be no shame.
John Gabriel Stedman
#38. If a great part comes up and the guy's meant to have an Eastern European accent, great; but if it's a bad part I won't take it.
Goran Visnjic
#39. The unemployment rate among the young in the United States is still very disconcerting, although we all know it's nowhere near as bad as it is in some of the European countries, where in some places it approaches 50 percent.
Anna Quindlen
#40. It's not the side-effects of the cocaine - I'm thinking that it must be love.
It's too late to be grateful,
It's too late to be hateful,
It's too late to be late again,
The European cannon is here.
David Bowie
#41. Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore rescinded the state's European Heritage Month proclamation for fear it would sound racist. It's too bad. Thus ends a month of celebrating the 400-year progression of our nation's British culture from wood to steel to graphite shafts.
Argus Hamilton
#42. If you go through all the structures and features of this emerging European monster you will notice that it more and more resembles the Soviet Union.
Vladimir Bukovsky
#43. The European Commission granted France an extra two years to meet its mandated budget deficit target of 3% of GDP. The deadline had already been extended by two years in 2013. It gave little explanation for the latest extension, which disappointed fiscal hawks.
Anonymous
#44. I said, yet again, for Germany, Europe is not only indispensable, it is part and parcel of our identity. We've always said German unity, European unity and integration, that's two parts of one and the same coin. But we want, obviously, to boost our competitiveness.
Angela Merkel
#45. Bankruptocracy is as much a European predicament as it is an American 'invention.' The difference between the experience of the two continents is that at least Americans did not have to labour under the enormous design faults of the eurozone.
Yanis Varoufakis
#46. Throughout the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, Latin was the language of learning and international communication. But in the early modern period, it was gradually displaced by French. By the eighteenth century, all the world - or at least all of Europe - aspired to be Parisian.
Michael Dirda
#47. Without Greece, it is not possible to preserve the integrity of the European phenomenon.
Evangelos Venizelos
#48. It's high time for a fresh European alternative to enter the market, taking the existing Internet behemoths head on. What the world needs now is a cloud storage service that is not subject to uncontrolled access by intelligence agencies.
Mikko Hypponen
#49. To us it seems that West-European civilization is civilization, but this is a narrow view.
Bertrand Russell
#50. American people are very patriotic, but there is no driver to get behind and support. I don't see why Formula One cannot be something America is a part of. I wouldn't say it's too European at all.
Alexander Rossi
#51. European Christianity has allowed itself to be intimately united with the powers of this world. Now that these powers are falling, it is as if it were buried under their ruins.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#52. I've said before that the Ryder Cup is not the European Tour versus the American Tour. It's Europe's best golfers against the US.
Lee Westwood
#53. I held a conference in Harvard where Americans said they didn't believe in risk. They thought it was just European hysteria. Then the terrorist attacks happened and there was a complete conversion. Suddenly terrorism was the central risk.
Ulrich Beck
#54. The country voted to leave the European Union, and it is the duty of the Government and of Parliament to make sure we do just that.
Theresa May
#55. We have nothing to hide and it should be clear for the international community whose fault it was that the last closed European border was not open.
Serzh Sargsyan
#57. Depay walks around like he has won 10 European Cups. This attitude ... what's it all about?
Ronald Koeman
#58. If it is presumed that the Kenyans will democratise in order to eat the peanuts of development assistance from the European Union ... it would be a big mistake
Meles Zenawi
#59. A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, 'So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear.
Peter L. Berger
#60. After the Berlin Wall came down I visited that city and I will never forget it. The abandoned checkpoints. The sense of excitement about the future. The knowledge that a great continent was coming together. Healing those wounds of our history is the central story of the European Union.
David Cameron
#61. It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.
Dalai Lama
#62. I have on the one hand a hatred and on the other a yearning for Vienna. I left when I was nine years old because I was Jewish. And even before 1938, the anti-Semitism in Austria was probably deeper than it was in Germany or in other European countries.
Eric Kandel
#63. I learned English at school, or at least that's how it started. Also, in Holland - as opposed to some other European countries - we don't dub anything, so as a kid growing up, always watching English and American movies in their original language really helped.
Michiel Huisman
#64. It is important to show our European partners that Portugal is a governable country.
Anibal Cavaco Silva
#65. We have now an American political party and a European one. Not all Americans who vote for the European party want to become Europeans. But it doesn't matter because that's what they're voting for. They're voting for dependency, for lack of ambition, and for insolvency.
Harvey Mansfield
#66. Look at the chaos of European history. Europeans cannot believe in certainty. But Americans believe in certainty. Americans think this can go on like this forever. Just as it is. No change.
Carl Andre
#67. My decision to view the world through novels, as it were, which is a typically European way of looking at things, became a heavy burden for me. But I took it on consciously, even though it was torture for me.
Orhan Pamuk
#68. And then, with a European director and Norwegian actors speaking in Norwegian, it was going to be very interesting. So, whatever initial trepidation or fear I may have had was alleviated by those factors. I just said, "This is something to get on board with."
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje
#69. I have often heard it said that the United States is isolated and is not interested in European affairs. I assure you that this is not the case.
Frank B. Kellogg
#70. By disparaging ballet he succeeded very well in convincing the boys that ballet was not for Americans, that it was European in origin and in continuing character.
Walter Terry
#71. Just take Germany and the suffering of Jews during and after the Second World War. It would be legal to ridicule and to laugh at this suffering, but since it was such a trauma on the European conscience, no one is going to do it. It is an open scar, an open wound, an open reality.
Tariq Ramadan
#72. [Wayne Rooney ] best tournament was the 2004 European Championships, when he played alongside me and made such a big impact, but it hasn't happened for him at the World Cup for one reason or another.
Michael Owen
#73. Very efficient, a new voice said approvingly. He decided to take it as a sign of approval, anyway. The speaker was a European-looking youth with a slightly haughty air.
David A. McIntee
#74. There is no word in any traditional European language which does not either denigrate or patronize the urban poor it is naming. That is power.
John Berger
#75. It is the historical mind, rather than the scientific (in the physicist's sense), that destroyed the mythical orientation of European culture; the historian, not the mathematician, introduced the "higher criticism," the standard of actual fact. It is he who is the real apostle of the realistic age.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#76. If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is. And
Anne Applebaum
#77. If you want a more democratic EU, communication has to be among its core tasks. There should be a legal foundation for it: Fifty years after the founding of the European project, communication belongs in the constitution.
Margot Wallstrom
#78. Britain is a European power. We cannot change our geography. Our involvement in the politics of European cooperation is one of necessity. Our wealth and our security depend upon it.
Charles Kennedy
#79. The single currency should allow the European Union, and therefore France, to balance its monetary strength with the United States. It should help us adjust to the development of China.
Laurent Fabius
#80. France would be reluctant to embrace any proposal by the European Commission to slash agricultural tariffs if it threatened the European Union's Common Agriculture Policy .
Christine Lagarde
#81. Yes. It's so much better to be stalked by a tall European than an American of average height.
Beth Fantaskey
#82. It was reported today that U.S. military bases will not show 'Brokeback Mountain.' However, during interrogations, U.S. troops will continue to show 'Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo.'
Conan O'Brien
#83. The "European Union" happens to be composed of people who hate our guts. It is the continent where Moveon-style lunatics are the friendly, pro-American types and the rest are crazy Muslims.
Ann Coulter
#84. It was the greatest loss of life in the history of the British military, and many in the West began to portray the "savage" as European rather than as some native in the jungle.
David Grann
#85. Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.
Julian Barnes
#86. It is conceivable that at some point a truly united and powerful European Union could become a global political rival to the United States.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
#87. It is the hope of the European Union that Ariel Sharon will keep the peace process alive and continue the dialogue according to the wishes of all the parties involved.
Goran Persson
#88. There is good evidence that last year's European heat wave was influenced by global warming. It resulted in 26,000 premature deaths and cost $13.5 billion.
Tony Blair
#89. I've always wondered why European politicians as a group seemed brighter than American politicians as a group. Maybe it's becausemany American politicians have the race issue to fall back on. They become lazy, suspicious of innovative ideas, and as a result American institutions atrophy.
Ishmael Reed
#90. It was wrong to allow Stalin to shape the European landscape of the 20th century. It would be even more wrong to let him shape the landscape of the 21st century.
Lawrence Summers
#91. According to Okonkwo, the British via its indirect rule system ensured that Africans saw their native leaders as the demons who betrayed their people. He called it a demonocracy and that was the first time I had seen him become so passionate about issues that affect Africa as a people and continent.
S.A. David
#92. She always called him Luca, in the Italian manner, and said it with that funny trans-European intonation, the accent oddly placed on the first syllable: 'Where's Loo-ka?', just like Audrey Hepburn saying, 'Take the pic-ture,' in Funny Face.
Adam Gopnik
#93. The Western public should learn and remember one essential thing about China: no matter what European and North American propaganda barks about the People's Republic, China is much more "democratic" than the West. It is democratic in its own way.
Andre Vltchek
#94. We believe that from both a German and a Polish perspective, it is desirable for Great Britain to remain in the European Union.
Angela Merkel
#95. Yes, Europe needs to be more welcoming, but that's only half of it. Muslims need to embrace the obligations of European residence and citizenship.
David Ignatius
#96. It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.
Ludwig Von Mises
#97. Lobsters, snails, crabs, clams, squids, slugs, and members of the European royal families, by contrast, have blue blood, due to the fact that it's based on copper rather than iron.
Alan Bradley
#98. I think the rules will change and I think more and more young women are going to decide that having a family and taking care of a home is not a bad choice, but how do we subsidize it - not necessarily European-style socialism. It'll have to be a new more creative, dynamic and local solution.
Christina Hoff Sommers
#99. Today, as young French and Dutch Muslims wander through Upper Manhattan and Chicago's South Side, it's not uncommon to see European politicians, journalists, and activists in those same urban areas, visiting mosques and community centers trying to identify "best practices" they can take back home.
Hisham D. Aidi
#100. My photography is very European. In America, I always get the sense that people are comforted by understanding what they're looking at. Photography's quite clear here [in the U.S.], it's very well-explained. My photography's perhaps not as well-explained.
Anton Corbijn
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