Europe

Jean-Louis Bourlanges - Jusqu’en 1940, pour les Etats-Unis, l’Europe est un modèle ; après 1945, elle était un enjeu ; depuis la chute de l’Union soviétique, elle n’est ni un enjeu ni un modèle.

Edmund Burke (1790) - The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.

Sir Winston Churchill - The Balkans have had more history than they can consume.

Alfred Grosser - La France voulait une Europe plus forte que l'URSS et que les Etats-Unis, mais ... moins forte que la France

Tony Judt - The paradox of the welfare state and indeed all the social democratic and Christian democratic states of Europe was quite simply that their success would over time undermine their appeal.

Tony Judt - It is not by chance that social democracy and welfare states have worked best in small, homogeneous countries, where issues of mistrust and suspicion do not arise so acutely.

Peter Lindseth (in Power and Legitimacy) - The problem in the EU is not a democratic deficit, in the sense of needing increased input legitimacy, but rather a democratic disconnect. European institutions are generally perceived as beyond the control of democratic and constitutional bodies in a historically recognizable sense, and this has a bearing on the scope of authority that Europeans believe supranational bodies can legitimately exercise.

Andrei Markovits - Nobody knows what it means to be a European. It is unclear what Greeks and Swedes have in common. But one important characteristic they share is their not being American.

Karl Gunnar Persson (in An Economic History of Europe, 2010) - About 80 per cent of the total population of the Roman Empire around the year 100 AD lived within the present (2010) borders of the European Union. 

Attributed to Paul-Henri Spaak - There are only two types of state in Europe: small states, and small states that have not yet realized they are small.

Timothy Snyders (2022) - What European history really shows, and quite powerfully, is that in order to become, quote unquote, a ‘normal’ European country, you have to become post-imperial, [that is] you have to lose your wars.

Traditional - The European Union serves to disguise both French weakness and German strength.

Bryan Ward-Perkins - Deep within the European psyche lies an anxiety that, if ancient Rome could fall, so too can the proudest of modern civilizations.