Quotes About Balkans

#1. I love the combination of the words 'spies' and 'Balkans.' It's like meat and potatoes.

Alan Furst

#2. Let's make a deal with the Serbs. Neither history nor emotion in the Balkans will permit multinationalism. We have to give up on the illusion of the last eight years ... Dayton isn't working. Nobody - except diplomats and petty officials - believes in a sovereign Bosnia and the Dayton accords.

Franjo Tudjman

#3. Romanians are culturally European, very close to the French. Socially, they are now building a society that is emotionally closer to the Balkans, Turkey and Greece.

Andrei Codrescu

#4. Once over there [Balkans], I felt extremely patriotic. Here are these people, from 18-year-olds to military veterans, enduring real duress for the cause of peace. I don't ever want to play for a regular audience again, only military folks who are starving for music.

Sheryl Crow

#5. (Milosevic's passing) should not keep us from our efforts to provide peace and stability in the Balkans; on the contrary, it should renew them.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier

#6. In the Middle East today there are too many people consumed by political dreams and too few interested in practical plans. That is why, to paraphrase Winston Churchill's line about the Balkans, the region produces more history than it consumes.

Fareed Zakaria

#7. For people may not know what they think about politics in the Balkans, or the vexed question of men and women, but everyone has a definite opinion about the flavour of shredded coconut.

Louis Simpson

#8. In the Balkans the peasants say that if you long for faraway countries and leave your own land and home to find them, you are born under A LILAC-BLEEDING STAR.

Lesley Blanch

#9. We are not only talking about waves of refugees coming to Greece, to Italy, and elsewhere. Destabilizing the Balkans means Lebanonization, and that means destabilizing all of Europe.

Fatos Nano

#10. The virus is moving quite substantially into new locations. My attention is pretty much equally divided between Europe, the southern Balkans and Black Sea area, Africa and south Asia.

David Nabarro

#11. While Financier George Soros was investing money in Kosovo's reconstruction, the George Soros Foundation for an Open Society had opened a branch office in Pristina establishing the Kosovo Foundation for an Open Society (KFOS) as part of the Soros' network of "non-profit foundations" in the Balkans.

Michel Chossudovsky

#12. Some slight friction threatening in the Balkans, sir.

P.G. Wodehouse

#13. SOME DAMNED FOOLISH THING in the Balkans, Bismarck had predicted, would ignite the next war. The assassination of the Austrian heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by Serbian nationalists on June 28, 1914, satisfied his condition.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#14. Guidebooks used to write the name of my city in two ways: Gjirokaster in Albanian, and Argyrokastron for foreigners. The classical-sounding name somehow gave it better credentials, because people in the Balkans famously exaggerate and often call their villages cities.

Ismail Kadare

#15. If you write anything meaningful over there, June, keep it far away from this city. They will turn a story about glue-addicted gypsy children in the Balkans into an animated musical about a tribe of pixie-sized fairy-dust-loving flamenco dancers who live happily ever after with their dancing bears.

Annie Ward

#16. I distrust all multiculturalism, liberal or conservative. The Balkans amply demonstrate the perils of Balkanization.

Charles Krauthammer

#17. Unlimited enmity of the Albanian people against Serbia is the foremost real result of the Albanian policies of the Serbian government. The second and more dangerous result is the strengthening of two big powers in Albania, which have the greatest interests in the Balkans.

Dimitrije Tucovic

#18. Well, let's assume the world is linear. If we required a certain amount of troops per 25,000 population in the Balkans, if the world is not radically different, something of the same extent is going to be needed in Iraq.

Eric Shinseki

#19. Remember all those references to Macedonia as the oasis of peace in the Balkans. You only really appreciate it when you have lost it.

Boris Trajkovski

#20. We should remember what Bismarck said in 1888: "If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans." Balkan

George Friedman

#21. My father, a Russian translator, wanted to distinguish me by calling me Misha, the Russian diminutive of his name, Michael. My name and work as a writer specialising in the Balkans has created a myth that I have Slavic connections, but actually I am British.

Misha Glenny

#22. [The Balkans] produce more history than they can consume.

Winston Churchill

#23. If this war is not fought with the greatest brutality against the bands both in the East and in the Balkans then in the foreseeable future the strength at our disposal will not be sufficient to be able to master this plague.

Wilhelm Keitel

#24. Diplomacy has been exhausted .. Continued instability in the Balkans threatens important U.S. national interests,.

Tom Daschle

#25. Some people say the Balkans is just inherently violent. That we have to fight a war every fifty years."
"I hope that's not true", I said.

Sara Novic

#26. The route for the refugees currently goes through Greece and the Balkans or through Italy; if there were a crisis in north-eastern Europe, Poland might just as well be affected. In this case we are dealing with mechanisms that we do not control. We need to change that.

Paolo Gentiloni

#27. If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.

Otto Von Bismarck

#28. The Balkans aren't worth the life of a single Pomeranian grenadier.

Otto Von Bismarck

#29. Of course, in no case would we allow the creation of a regional union in the Balkans, directed against the Soviet Union and Bulgaria.

Todor Zhivkov

#30. I've worked behind counters serving food, and I've lived on the circus train, and I've led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia. I've been a key liner for a newspaper, I've done typesetting. Oh, all sorts of things.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

#31. There has been enough blood in the Balkans. Serbia is offering its hand. Let us turn to the future and not deal with the past.

Ivica Dacic

#32. One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans (1888).

Otto Von Bismarck

#33. Grouping and mutuality of countries and peoples in the Balkans is the only road that leads to economic, national and political liberation.

Dimitrije Tucovic

#34. A history of perceived humiliation, after all, lurks behind many acts of terror. And competing narratives of victimhood and insults sustain conflicts in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and many other regions.

Serge Schmemann

#35. There are some common problems in the Balkans in the settlement of which Bulgaria should also participate.

Todor Zhivkov

#36. The writer does not dare dream of giving the best of his individuality. No, he must never express his anger. The vacillating demands of mediocrity must be satisfied. Amuse the people, be their clown, give them platitudes about which they can laugh, shadows of truth which they can hold as truths.

Aleksandar Hemon

#37. To Balkanize has come to be used in a derogatory sense meaning to violently fragment, disrupt or disorganize..

Antonia Young

#38. YOU MAY NOT SUCCEED IN ONE DAY, BUT ONE DAY YOU WILL SUCCEED!

Kenan Crnkic

#39. Balkanization.. had come to denote the parcelization of large & viable political units but also had become a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian.

Maria N. Todorova