Quotes About European History

#1. Whoever thinks war allows for lasting victories should take a look at European history books and learn their lesson.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier

#2. The conflict with Islam has, after all, existed throughout European history.

Walter Kasper

#3. More than forty years of Communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe resulted in an unhappy and artificial division of Europe. It is this dark chapter of European history that we now have the opportunity to close.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen

#4. Although the pineapple had been widely disseminated for centuries among the native peoples of South and Central America, it didn't figure in European history until 1493.

Kate Christensen

#5. You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.

Richard Dawkins

#6. Luce recognized her from European history class. Amy Something.

Lauren Kate

#7. The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why. Both

Timothy Snyder

#8. John Paul II, above all, managed to contain the huge mass of frustration, of hate that had accumulated in that region, in favour of a peaceful transition. This was, without doubt, something that changed European history.

Rocco Buttiglione

#9. Wanna go study about incestuous royal families and bloody murders?' she asked him. 'Or do you wanna study European history instead?

Robin Benway

#10. In the darkest days of European history, America stood close by us and today we stand close by America, nothing will ever be the same.

Romano Prodi

#11. Can a geology teacher blithely tell his students that the earth is flat, or a European history professor that the Holocaust didn't happen? That's not academic freedom, but dereliction of duty.

Jerry A. Coyne

#12. I have a degree in European history, which didn't necessarily have any direct impact on my career, but I'm grateful I studied something other than acting in college.

Becki Newton

#13. I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment.

Lisel Mueller

#14. We have seen and do see the type of evil that is within human civilization, and the Holocaust took place in European history during an advanced state of technology and form of civilization, only to become an event in that history that questioned what civilization actually means.

Laszlo Nemes

#15. The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.

George Will

#16. In 1917 European history, in the old sense, came to an end. World history began. It was the year of Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom repudiated the traditional standards of political behaviour. Both preached Utopia, Heaven on Earth. It was the moment of birth for our contemporary world.

A.J.P. Taylor

#17. Starting with the Renaissance and running through the Enlightenment, there occurred what we might call "the great reversal." Suddenly, very suddenly, the Ascenders were out, the Descenders were in - and the transition was bloody, arguably the bloodiest cognitive transformation in European history.

Ken Wilber

#18. 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

#19. From Caesar's legions to the Napoleonic wars. From the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution to the defeat of nazism. We have helped to write European history, and Europe has helped write ours.

David Cameron

#20. Scandinavia is boring. People living there apparently have little to do. And as European history teaches, when there is nothing much to do, you may as well amuse yourself by attacking the Jews.

Elliott Abrams

#21. The history of representations of Cleopatra provides one of the clearest instances of the conviction that whiteness is the pinnacle of human beauty. Cleopatra became a byword for feminine beauty in European culture, but in the process she had to be represented as white. As

Richard Dyer

#22. I turned pro and won Rookie of the Year on the South African Tour and then it took me two tries at the qualifying school on the European Tour and to get my card and the rest is history.

Retief Goosen

#23. There is of course a deep spiritual need which the pilgrimage seems to satisfy, particularly for those hardy enough to tackle the journey on foot.

Edwin Mullins

#24. There flows throughout our whole history a stream of humanity, of generosity, of tolerance, so broad, so powerful, and so pure that it would be vain indeed to look for a similar one in the past of any other European country.

Ignacy Jan Paderewski

#25. One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

George Saintsbury

#26. In late 1949, at two and a half years old, I arrived in Jamaica for the first time. I had crossed the Atlantic by air from England. My Jamaican father was studying in London, my European mother was sick, and so in true Jamaican style I was sent home to my grandparents.

Rachel Manley

#27. The biggest danger to the European Union comes not from those who advocate change, but from those who denounce new thinking as heresy. In its long history Europe has experience of heretics who turned out to have a point.

David Cameron

#28. The problem is that in America is that the nation state has been so weak when it comes to the history of big markets the history of big business in a way so we have a very weak welfare state compared to European nation states.

Cornel West

#29. In the fog of history and myth, the American role in championing and underwriting European integration is frequently forgotten, along with the resistance of the Europeans.

George Friedman

#30. Naples was the great European metropolis where faith in technology, in science, in economic development, in the kindness of nature, in history that leads of necessity to improvement, in democracy, was revealed, most clearly and far in advance, to be completely without foundation.

Elena Ferrante

#31. French was assigned to sculpt allegorical figures of the continents. His America, from 1907, is one of the most concise depictions of our history I've ever seen: a European stepping on a Mayan head.

Sarah Vowell

#32. Another way of putting this is that black Baptists were outsiders to the dominant white/European way of doing church. Instead, they forged a history of their own, and even their own distinct form of sacred music.

Thomas S. Kidd

#33. Often the lines that define the traditional European arrangement of fiction, non-fiction, history, etc. are not useful. These lines can distort the world we, people who look like me, live in - and by the world, I mean our personal experience of it.

Jamaica Kincaid

#34. As a European Union member state, as a country committed throughout all its history to the fight for the values that I have made my own, as the fifth world power, as a country that has marked my life and European Union houses part of European Union, France can act if it wishes to do so.

Julian Assange

#35. We can't completely rely on the aberrations of history to explain today's European necessities. Future-related issues are no less pressing.

Jean-Claude Juncker

#36. The art of Europe is drowned in the centuries in the war-scarred face of a motherland..

John Geddes

#37. English has always had a special fondness for other European languages, a neighborly soft spot - perhaps because Britain has been invaded by speakers of those languages from the onset of its recorded history.

Rabih Alameddine

#38. What I discovered in Auschwitz is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure, where the European traveler arrived after his two-thousand-year-old moral and cultural history.

Imre Kertesz

#39. 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

#40. Muhammadan law in its relation to women, is a pattern to European law. Look back to the history of Islam, and you will find that women have often taken leading places - on the throne, in the battle-field, in politics, in literature, poetry, etc.

Annie Besant

#41. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.

Milan Kundera

#42. Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is just what you're going to get! (Brigadier-General Henry Wilson, on being challenged in 1910 about the likelihood of a European war)

Max Hastings

#43. Socrates (770-399 B.C.[E.]) is possibly the most enigmatic figure in the entire history of philosophy. He never wrote a single line. Yet he is one of the philosophers who has had the greatest influence on European thought, not least because of the dramatic manner of his death.

Jostein Gaarder

#44. Perhaps enlightenment, technology and secularism haven't cleared Europe of the oldest science of all - the occult.

Adam Nevill

#45. Haiti was founded by African slaves who rose against their European masters, had a revolution, and created a new state. There is no other such event in Western history.

Madison Smartt Bell

#46. The history of England, who has always dealt most harshly with her vanquished foe in the few European wars in which she has taken part in modern times, gives us Germans an idea of the fate in store for us if defeated.

Bernhard Von Bulow

#47. In every European nation, there have been problems in history when the society was too divided.

Harri Holkeri

#48. Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.

Edmund Morgan

#49. 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

#50. High culture is nothing but a child of that European perversion called history, the obsession we have with going forward, with considering the sequence of generations a relay race in which everyone surpasses his predecessor ...

Milan Kundera

#51. 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

#52. There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#53. The team which I led to the 1992 European Championship Finals is the only one in the history of the entire competition to have won every single one of its qualifying matches.

Michel Patini

#54. It wasn't easy to learn about Gustave LeBon. For being the father of such an enduring theory, almost nothing has been written about him. Only one man has ever tried to piece his life story together - Bob Nye, a professor of European intellectual history at Oregon State University.

Jon Ronson

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. ...our history, the history of European Jews...they will never forgive us for the evil they've done to us

Marceline Loridan-Ivens

#58. Europe needs to develop a sense of collective history - we need to write books from a European perspective, to teach it in schools as well.

Bernard-Henri Levy

#59. I don't have to be jealous of Barcelona because they have 100 years of history and have won the European Cup once. I have only been managing for five years and I have the same amount of Champions League trophies to my name.

Jose Mourinho

#60. The mere fact that my comments have caused such strong protests, although I'm not a European, and also the fact that I have been compared with certain persons in German history indicates how charged with conflict the atmosphere for research is in your country. Here in Iran you needn't worry.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

#61. The UK is not going to leave the European Union. Of course not. We are inextricably wound up with Europe. In terms of culture, history and geography, we are a European nation.

Nick Clegg

#62. As part of the E.U., my children can have the freedom and the opportunity to work and live across Europe; to be ambitious in the world's largest market; and to access so much of the history, the culture and the opportunity which is our common European heritage.

Andrew Lansley

#63. It does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state ... it means the end of a thousand years of history.

Hugh Gaitskell

#64. Gabriel Wilensky's book is an excellent introduction into the history of antisemitism in Europe. His words will rightly unsettle those who have yet to come to grips with Christianity's role in shaping European attitudes and policies towards Jews into the 20th century.

Jonathan Friedman