Western Europe Quotes

#1. NATO was constructed on the - with the reason, whether one believes it or not, that it was going to defend Western Europe from Russian assault. Once the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, that reason was gone. So, first question: why does NATO exist?

Noam Chomsky

#2. In the United States, Western Europe and Japan, there is widespread access to dialysis, most of it publicly funded. But in many countries, the majority of patients who need dialysis die without it.

Sheri Fink

#3. On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature.

Leo Tolstoy

#4. 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.

Herman Gorter

#5. The idea that modernisation makes for enhanced national power and rapid progress and helps everyone achieve greater happiness has its origins in the astonishing political, economic and military successes of western Europe in the 19th century.

Pankaj Mishra

#6. The expulsion and welcome of the Jews provides a striking contrast between Christian persecution and Muslim tolerance, and in economic terms between western Europe's short-sightedness and sound Ottoman investment.

David Brewer

#7. In the early Middle Ages the dominant form of political organization in Western Europe was the Germanic kingdom, and the German kingdom was in some ways the complete antithesis of the modern state. (p. 13)

Joseph Reese Strayer

#8. A relatively small and eternally quarrelsome country in Western Europe, fountainhead of rationalist political manias, militarily impotent, historically inglorious during the past century, democratically bankrupt, Communist-infiltrated from top to bottom.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#9. 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.

John Major

#10. There's still racism. Western Europe ... has taken the native cultures of the Americas, the African cultures, the Asian civilization and lumped them together into The Others.

Hans Rosling

#11. 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.

Lloyd Cutler

#12. There is an enormous difference between Russia and Western Europe.

Herman Gorter

#13. 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.

Kenzaburo Oe

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

Yehuda Levi

#15. The Mongols offered no counterpart to the common public entertainment of burning people alive that occurred so frequently in western Europe wherever the Christian church had the power to do so.

Jack Weatherford

#16. The health-care sector certainly employs more people and more machines than it did. But there have been no great strides in service. In Western Europe, most primary-care practices now use electronic health records and offer after-hours care; in the United States, most don't.

Atul Gawande

#17. A series of studies in the 1990s and 2000s revealed that as women gained more access to education, jobs, and birth control, they had fewer children. As a result, developed countries in western Europe, Japan, and the Americas were seeing zero or negative population growth.

Annalee Newitz

#18. The barbarian invasion put an end, for six centuries, to the civilization of western Europe. It lingered in Ireland until the Danes destroyed it in the ninth century;

Bertrand Russell

#19. Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith - even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity.

Karen Armstrong

#20. The revolution in Russia was victorious with the help of the poor peasants. This should always be borne in mind here in Western Europe and all the world over. But the workers in Western Europe stand alone: this should never be forgotten in Russia.

Herman Gorter

#21. In the seventh century the Arabs created a new world into which other peoples were drawn. In the nineteenth and twentieth, they were themselves drawn into a new world created in western Europe.

Albert Hourani

#22. Well, I think he's right to notice that there is a difference in attitudes and even in the broadest sense of world view between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. Which is old and which is new is an interesting question, and I almost think that maybe he's got it backwards.

Robert Kagan

#23. We are hearing the imams that are preaching in places like the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. The imam preached there to the migrants go in to Western Europe, build your enclaves there, breed their women and do not associate or assimilate into the broader society.

Steve King

#24. Because in Russia you were able to triumph with the help of a large class of poor peasants, you represent things in such a way, as if we in Western Europe are also going to have that help.

Herman Gorter

#25. 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.

John S. Watson

#26. Western Europe GDP per capita - not taking into account the new accession counties - was lower in 2001 relative to that of the US than any time since the 1960's.

John Hutton

#27. On the twelfth of June, the forces of Western Europe crossed the borders of Russia, and war began
that is, an event took place contrary to human reason and to the whole of human nature.

Leo Tolstoy

#28. Manuscript editions didn't immediately die out with the printing explosion that burst across Europe in the 1460s and 1470s. Manuscripts continued to be produced into the 16th century, many decades after presses had spread to most minor cities in Western Europe.

Ian Lamont

#29. Scientists have always thought that because mammoths roamed such a huge territory - from Western Europe to Central North America - that North American woolly mammoths were a sideshow of no particular significance to the evolution of the species.

Hendrik Poinar

#30. I'm of course disillusioned with what has happened to World cinema. Now cinemas in both Eastern and Western Europe are filled with the same blockbusters from Hollywood.

Alexander Walker

#31. 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.

Joseph Lelyveld

#32. 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.

Richard Parks Bland

#33. America and Western Europe are on a moneymaking, pleasure-mad spree unparalleled in the history of the world. God is generally ignored or ridiculed. Church members in many cases are only halfhearted Christians. Judgment is coming.

Billy Graham

#34. All Ballets' fundamental steps are derived from the folk dances of Western Europe.

Ninette De Valois

#35. 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.

Charles B. Rangel

#36. 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.

Henry James Sumner Maine

#37. 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?

Herman Gorter

#38. In many ways, the system of government, taxation and military organization developed by the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the envy of Western Europe.

Noel Malcolm

#39. Our use of phrase 'The Dark ages' to cover the period from 699 to 1,000 marks our undue concentration on Western Europe ...

Bertrand Russell

#40. The markets where we've got real good presence are the older, more mature markets like Australia, and Western Europe - where we've only got 6,000 stores, compared to the US with 13,000.

Jim Cantalupo

#41. Of course you know this difference as well as I do, only you failed to draw from it the conclusions for the tactics in Western Europe, at least as far as I am able to judge from your works.

Herman Gorter

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

Anatoly Chubais

#43. Between 1995 and 2009, Western Europe's entrepreneurs created jobs faster than the U.S. did, and European economies exported more than the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Eastern Europe's productivity increased more rapidly than East Asia's.

Sri Mulyani Indrawati

#44. Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called the 'cities of the world', then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute 'the rural areas of the world'.

Lin Biao

#45. Putting one's parents out to pasture in a nursing home has very deep historical roots in Western Europe.

Francis Fukuyama

#46. Everywhere you look Britain, the States, western Europe people are sealing themselves into crime-free enclaves. That's a mistake a certain level of crime is part of the necessary roughage of life. Total security is a disease of deprivation.

J.G. Ballard

#47. 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.

Jens Stoltenberg

#48. I thought it went without saying that when the Soviet Union collapsed and the eastern states opened up, we would be plagued by a new kind of criminality in Sweden and Western Europe. And that is what happened.

Henning Mankell

#49. The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to re-create the Soviet Union in Western Europe.

Mikhail Gorbachev

#50. 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.

Thomas Sowell

#51. 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.

Anton Chekhov

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

William Pfaff

#53. 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.

Malcolm Muggeridge

#54. 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.

George Edward Woodberry

#55. 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!'

Craig Bruce

#56. 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.

Aldrich Ames

#57. 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!

Herman Gorter

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

Walter Lippmann

#59. Germany is probably the richest country in Western Europe. Yet they wouldn't take any television with Duke and Ella, their reaction being that people weren't interested in it.

Norman Granz

#60. Europe was best described, to his mind, as an elaborate engine for dissociating the confined American from that indispensable knowledge, and was accordingly only rendered bearable by these occasional stations of relief, traps for the arrest of wandering western airs.

Henry James

#61. It's true that the war in Iraq opened a distance in relations between part of Europe and the U.S. government, but our basic ties are stronger than that. We share democracy, free markets and a commitment to Western security. We differ on how to guarantee that security.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero

#62. My grandparents left the Pale of Settlement at the border of western Russia and Eastern Europe in the early 1900s, fleeing anti-Semitism and hoping to make a better life for their children in America.

Merrick Garland

#63. Instead of a 'Western Christianity,' we now witness a post-Christian West (in Europe) and a post-Western Christianity (in the global South). America is somewhere in between.

Harvey Cox

#64. The western nations of Europe, who now so immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors, and stand at the summit of civilization, owe little or none of their superiority to direct inheritance from the old Greeks, though they owe much to the written works of that wonderful people.

Charles Darwin

#65. Germany was the centerpiece in Western and Eastern Europe in both wars.

Anonymous

#66. Information and inspiration are everywhere ... history, art, architecture, everything an illustrator needs. Europe is, after all, the land that has generated most of the enduring myths and legends of Western culture.

John Howe

#67. Stay away from Europe, stay away from Japan, Australia. If you go to the Western world, you're gonna pay more money. You can spend five months in Bali for what you'd spend in one month in Europe.

Rita Gelman

#68. Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.

Gore Vidal

#69. [Europe has] this tradition of self revelation in popular music. We have it here - it's called Country Western Music ... I think that's where the deeper and more complex subjects are treated.

Leonard Cohen

#70. Overcoming the Cold War required courage from the people of Central and Eastern Europe and what was then the German Democratic Republic, but it also required the steadfastness of Western partner over many decades when many had long lost hope of integration of the two Germanys and Europe.

Angela Merkel

#71. When Europe dominated, there were no or few feedback loops. Or, to put it another way, there were few, if any, consequences for its behaviour towards the non-western world: relations were simply too unequal.

Martin Jacques

#72. You've gotta understand: in July of '44, the Allies were still contained on the peninsula in western France and the destruction of Europe had not really begun. War had not really touched the European continent at that point.

Christopher McQuarrie

#73. In the middle of Europe in the middle of the twentieth century, the Nazi and Soviet regimes murdered some fourteen million people. The place where all of the victims died, the bloodlands, extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic States.

Timothy Snyder

#74. Colonialism is an idea born in the West that drives Western countries - like France, Italy, Belgium, Great Britain - to occupy countries outside of Europe.

Ahmed Ben Bella

#75. I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe's PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it's America.

Niall Ferguson

#76. I returned from the West, and brought home in my nostrils and nerves that benumbing lethargy, imprudent hostility, and arrogant superiority with which the West viewed the fate of Eastern Europe.

Sandor Marai