European History Quotes

“At one point, approximately halfway through her remarks, Merkel stated in German something about ‘being able to greet the president of the United States of America, Barack Obama,’ and an overly ambitious Obama, who perhaps thought that was his cue, headed toward the podium.  Perhaps catching the president’s movement out of the corner of her eye, Merkel thought quickly, and without even looking up from her notes, she told the excited American president, in English, ‘Not yet, dear Mr. President, dear Barack Obama.’ Obama sheepishly returned to his seat to allow the chancellor to finish her speech.”
― Claudia Clark, Dear Barack: The Extraordinary Partnership of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel

“Then, in an unusual moment, she grew emotional, which left little doubt about the level of profound respect and admiration Merkel had for her American colleague:
‘So eight years are coming to a close.  This is the last visit of (President) Barack Obama to our country…I am very glad that he chose Germany as one of the stopovers on this trip…Thank you for the reliable friendship and partnership you demonstrated in very difficult hours of our relationship. So let me again pay tribute to what we’ve been able to achieve, to what we discussed, to what we were able to bring about in difficult hours.”
― Claudia Clark, Dear Barack: The Extraordinary Partnership of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel

“In her usual manner, Merkel spoke in German. It is worth pointing out, however, that before the translator had an opportunity to convert her statements to English, Obama gave the chancellor and the press a big smile, saying, ‘I think what she said was good. I’m teasing.’ The laughter in the room drowned out the sounds of the cameras clicking and flashing, with Merkel’s giggle and smile among the loudest.”
― Claudia Clark, Dear Barack: The Extraordinary Partnership of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel

“There have been two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“As libertines we seek to find and provide pleasures for others before pleasing ourselves. Libertines are never boorish, profane or blasphemous. We seek to lessen any cause for offence while maximizing pleasure. After our liaisons, our return is eagerly anticipated, and our departure is mourned. For most men the reverse is the case. In a world where most men are barely on before they are off again, we take the time and the care to be gentle lovers and build the sighs and the panting of true delight.”
― Harry F. MacDonald, Casanova and the Devil's Doorbell

“I admire the Queen greatly,” Casanova confided in me. “She can tie a man up by his thumbs, discuss philosophy with Diderot and Voltaire, and plot and scheme like a Dutch diplomat. She has voracious appetites, uses exquisite French scents, is kind to animals, fences like a Hungarian hussar, recreates herself on a white silk swing in a room full of mirrors, and gives afternoon tea parties for society ladies. Useful horsewoman, too.”
― Harry F. MacDonald, Casanova and the Devil's Doorbell

“Je zou de geschiedenis van Europa kunnen beschrijven als een geschiedenis van terugverlangen naar de geschiedenis.”
― Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer, Grand Hotel Europa

“I want the freedom to explore the world, sleep beneath the stars, eat from the land, and take pride of every feat I endure.”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Maid's Secret

“The sunsets and sunrises of civilization are inevitably separated by intervals of isolated darkness. The night that followed the Roman sunset was long and uncertain, and the turmoil it brought consumed countless man. But mankind itself did not yield. With its gaze fixed on a distant future, it persevered. Until the first rays of a new dawn at long last penetrated the horizon.”
― Arnold Joseph Toynbee

“History is lived forwards but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.”
― C.V. Wedgwood, William the Silent: William of Nassau, Prince of Orange 1533-1584

“We also discussed whether these videos in some way contributed to a sense of European superiority, as if police forces in Europe were not endemically racist.

Which they are, Bobbi said.

Yeah I don't think the expression is "American cops are bastards," said Nick.”
― Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends / Normal People

“It was an amazing vision. Few stretches of Central Europe have been the theatre for so much history. Beyond which watershed lay the pass where Hannibal's elephants had slithered downhill? Only a few miles away, the frontier of the Roman Empire had begun. Deep in those mythical forests that the river reflected for many days' march, the German tribes, Rome's Nemesis, had waited for their hour to strike. The Roman limes followed the river's southern bank all the way to the Black Sea. The same valley, functioning in reverse, funneled half the barbarians of Asia into Central Europe and just below my eyrie, heading upstream, the Huns entered and left again before swimming their ponies across the Rhine - or trotting them over the ice - until, foiled by a miracle, they drew rein a little short of Paris. Charlemagne stalked across the corner of his empire to destroy the Avars in Pannonia and a few leagues southwest, the ruins of Hohenstaufen, home of the family that plunged Emperors and Popes into centuries of vendetta, crumbled still.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

“The Inquisition in Ferdinand’s domains almost immediately acquired an even more unsavory reputation than that in Castile.”
― Kirstin Downey, Isabella: The Warrior Queen

“While she was beneficient in many ways, she also seems to have had an unforgiving streak that made her harsh, punitive, and unbending in punishing people she saw as evildoers and in seeking to accomplish her goals.”
― Kirstin Downey, Isabella: The Warrior Queen

“I want the freedom to explore the world, sleep beneath the stars, eat from the land, and take pride in every feat I endure.”
― Shari J. Ryan

“We all face the threat of losing how much or how little we have, and I can’t help wondering what the point would be in destroying something that has survived much longer than either of us.
”
― Shari J. Ryan, The Maid's Secret

“At their 1848 convention in New York, Garrison and his followers promised to proudly remember “that one of the first acts of the French people, after the achievement of their own liberty, was to decree the immediate emancipation of [their] slaves.” A few days earlier, on May 9, the American and Foreign AntiSlavery Society had celebrated “the progress of emancipation in the colonies of Sweden, Denmark, and France” and expressed the hope “that the last spot on earth where slavery exist[ed would] not be the Republic that was first to proclaim the equality of man.”
― Mischa Honeck, We Are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848

“Ultimately, the witch craze was not the result of just one single factor. Rather, it was a conglomeration of influences that worked together over the span of hundreds of years to shape early modern Europe into the ideal environment for a continent-wide witch hunt: misogyny, patriarchy, religious tyranny, scapegoating, land disputes, the rise of capitalism, shifting views about magic, political propaganda, and an established history of persecution and violence.”
― Celeste Larsen, Heal the Witch Wound: Reclaim Your Magic and Step Into Your Power

“Closer to the sun than any of its surroundings, the town glimmered. The spires looked like the tips of a royal crown. Skilled artisans had built wonderful, terraced homes and small flats overlooking gardens and fields under a clear cloudless sky. The air was filled with the aroma of eggplant parmigiana being roasted and fried garlic from pasta aglio e olio. Every pantry had a tall, glass bottle of local olive oil and a cupboard full of sugo jars.”
― Steven Keith Hunter, Relish In the Tread

“World History 101 - The Actual History

History is not a record of truth, history is a record of triumph. The triumphant writes history as it fits their narrative - or to be more accurate, history is written by the conquerors for maintaining the supremacy of the conquerors, while the conquered lose everything.

Let me give you an example. In a commendable endeavor of goodwill and reparations a descendant of the British conquerors, President Lyndon Johnson started Hispanic Heritage Week, which was later expanded into a month by another white descendant, President Ronald Reagan - fast forward to present time - during the Hispanic Heritage Month the entire North America tries to celebrate Native American history. But there is a glitch - Spanish is not even a Native American language.

Native Americans did not even speak Spanish, until the brutes of Spain overran Puerto Rico like pest bearing disease and destruction, after a pathetic criminal called Columbus stumbled upon "La Isabela" in the 1500s.

Many of the natives struggled till death to save their home - many were killed by the foreign diseases to which they had no immunity. Those who lived, every last trace of their identity was wiped out, by the all-powerful and glorious spanish colonizers - their language, their traditions, their heritage, everything - just like the Portuguese did in Brazil.

The Spaniards would've done the same to Philippines on the other side of the globe, had they had the convenience to stay longer. Heck, even the name Philippines is not the original name - the original name of the islands was (probably) Maniolas, as referred to by Ptolemy. But when the Spaniard retards of the time set foot there, they named it after, then crown prince, later Philip II of Spain.

Just reminiscing those abominable atrocities makes my blood boil, and yet somehow, the brutal "glory" of the conquerors lives on as such even in this day and age, as glory that is.

That's why José Martí is so important, that's why Kwanzaa is so important, that's why Darna is so important - in the making of a world that has a place for every culture, not just the culture of the conquerors.

No other "civilized" people have done more damage to the world than the Europeans, and yet, on the pages of history books their glory of conquest is still packaged as glory, not as atrocity. Why is that? I don't know the answer - do you?

Trillions of dollars, pounds and euros in aid won't suffice to undo the damage - but what just might heal those wounds from the past, is if the offspring of the oppressors and the offspring of the oppressed, both hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder, unravel the history as it happened, not as it was presented - what just might heal the scars of yesterday, is if together we come forward to learn about each other's past, so that for the first time in history, we can actually write "human history", not the "conquerors' history" - so that for the first time ever, we write history not as conquerors and conquered, not as oppressors and oppressed, but as one species - as one humankind.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“No other "civilized" people have done more damage to the world than the Europeans.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“There are shades of barbarism in twentieth-century Europe which would once have amazed the most barbarous of barbarians. At a time when the instruments of constructive change had outstripped anything previously known, Europeans acquiesced in a string of conflicts which destroyed more human beings than all past convulsions put together.”
― Norman Davies, Europe: A History

“It is simply not enough to know that English politicians and armies won the battle for eastern America—we already knew that. What we need to take into account, now that history is more than past politics, is that in cultural attraction and educational sophistication the English were decidedly inferior to their French and Indian rivals, who lost what they did for other reasons.”
― James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America

“They missed the chance to learn that “savage” and “civilized” are relative terms without objective authority or content, that “men call that barbarism” which simply is “not common to them”. Such a lesson was badly needed in that fiercely intolerant age, as it still is in our own more subtly and intolerant one.”
― James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America

“The blind faith that they were God’s “chosen people” prevented them from recognizing the tragic hubris in their national compulsion to “reduce” the natives to less than they were. Born of pride, the European philosophy of conversion spawned the triple terrors of cultural arrogance, dogmatism, and intolerance on a grand scale.”
― James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America

“Up to 95 percent of the original Native American population, estimated at roughly twenty million people, disappeared after the invasion of European colonizers. While there was direct violence toward Native Americans, many of these deaths can be attributed to the introduction of smallpox. Smallpox is a virus that is spread when one comes into contact with infected bodily fluids or contaminated objects such as clothing or blankets. The virus then finds its way into a person's lymphatic system. Within days of infection, large, painful pustules begin to erupt over the victim's skin.

In school curriculums, this has often been taught as an unfortunate tragedy, an accidental side effect of trade, and therefore a reason to claim that the Europeans did not commit genocide. However, in recent years, many historians have recognized that the spreading of smallpox was an early form of biological warfare, one which was understood and used without mercy from at least the mid-1700s. Noted conversations among army officials include letters discussing the idea of "sending the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes" and using "every stratagem to reduce them." Another official, Henry Bouquet, wrote a letter that told his subordinates to "try to Innoculate [sic] the Indians, by means of Blankets, as well as to Try Every other Method, that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race." They followed through on their plan, giving two blankets and a handkerchief from a Smallpox Hospital alongside other gifts to seal an agreement of friendship between the local Native tribes and the men at Fort Pitt, located in what is now western Pennsylvania.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“No one wanted to use the word 'murder' then, using instead words more apt to talking about a pest problem than a human race. Even today the United States still has not officially recognized genocide in its history.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“Even today the United States still has not officially recognized genocide in its history.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“I wanted to devour this woman's dignity. Congratulations for what exactly? For having a family who made it through genocide? For being part of the slim population of surviving Native Americans post-colonization? An anger simmered in my throat, begging to be let loose on this stupid woman who was there to simply enjoy her vacation. How dare she remain blissfully unaware of the modern existence of Native Americans when all she had seen were movies making us look like history? As mad as I was, I knew it wasn't her fault and I couldn't muster up the energy to boil my anger into a response.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“I would nod along for the sake of peace but in
truth some part of me always rebelled. Why did he think it so important for me to know that Beethoven dedicated a sonata to a mulatto violinist, or that Shakespeare’s dark lady really was dark, or that Queen Victoria had deigned to raise a child of Africa, “bright as any white girl?” I did not want to rely on each European fact having its African shadow, as if without the scaffolding of the European fact everything African might turn to dust in my hands. It gave me no pleasure to see that sweet-faced girl dressed like one of Victoria’s own children, frozen in a formal photograph, with a new kind of cord round her neck. I always wanted life—movement.”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time