Balkans Quotes
![[The Balkans] produce more history than they can consume. (Winston Churchill)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/33/winston-churchill-history-produce-79633.webp)
I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The mot juste unarriving? Tell that to your desk.
Geraldine Brooks
Yes, this is Europe. The Europe that did not respond to the Serb shelling of Dubrovnik. Or the three-year siege of Sarajevo. The Europe that let Bosnia die.
A new definition of Europe: the place where tragedies don't take place. Wars, genocides - that happened here once, but no longer. It's something that happens in Africa. (Or places in Europe that are not "really" Europe. That is, the Balkans.) Again, perhaps I exaggerate. But having spent a good part of three years, from 1993 to 1996, in Sarajevo, it does not seem to me like an exaggeration at all.
Susan Sontag
Medieval Islam was a religion of remarkable tolerance for its time, allowing Jews and Christians the right to practise their inherited beliefs, and setting an example which was not, unfortunately, copied for many centuries in the West. The surprise, ladies and gentlemen, is the extent to which Islam has been a part of Europe for so long, first in Spain, then in the Balkans, and the extent to which it has contributed so much towards the civilisation which we all too often think of, wrongly, as entirely Western. Islam is part of our past and our present, in all fields of human endeavour. It has helped to create modern Europe. It is part of our own inheritance, not a thing apart.
Charles III
There's a leveling homogeneity in America today created by television. Each day it passes over the vast land mass, over the states nudging each other like the sovereignties of the Balkans, creating a unifying cloud of aesthetic properties and experience. East and West, North and South are wrapped in a sort of over-soul of images, facts, happenings, celebrities. This debris is as sacred to our current fiction as gossip about the new vicar was to Trollope. And there it is on the page, informing the domestically restless households, father off somewhere, mother chagrined. Sons and daughters writing the books.
Elizabeth Hardwick
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
Contemporary liberals think of rights as universal human attributes that can be respected anywhere, but here they show a characteristic disregard of history. Current understandings of human rights developed along with the modern nation-state. It was the nation-state that emancipated individuals from the communal ties of medieval times and created freedom as it has come to be known in the modern world. This was not done without enormous conflict and severe costs. Large-scale violence was an integral feature of the process. If the US became a modern nation only after a civil war, France did so only after the Napoleonic wars and Germany after two world wars and the Cold War. In Africa and the Balkans the struggle for nationhood has run in parallel with ethnic cleansing, while the welding of China into a nation that is underway today involves the suppression of Muslim minorities and something not far from genocide in Tibet.
John N. Gray
The Führer has ordered that the enemy employs in partisan warfare Communist-trained fanatics who do not hesitate to commit any atrocity. It is more than ever a question of life and death. This fight has nothing to do with soldierly gallantry or principles of the Geneva Convention. If the fight against the partisans in the East, as well as in the Balkans, is not waged with the most brutal means, we will shortly reach the point where the available forces are insufficient to control the area. It is therefore not only justified, but it is the duty of the troops to use all means without restriction, even against women and children, so long as it ensures success. Any consideration for the partisans is a crime against the German people.
Wilhelm Keitel
Europe today is a powder keg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal ... A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all ... I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where ... Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off.
Otto von Bismarck
What is Europe doing? It takes more than six months to organize a summit alone. By that time, one million new migrants have arrived. This is why, for instance, some countries along the Balkans route like us had to act on their own. If we had trusted Brussels and had not reacted on our own initiative, we would already have been flooded with jihadists. The EU has no right to accuse Macedonia. We are merely looking after ourselves.
Gjorge Ivanov
What is the trouble in Europe today? Immediately after the War the danger was Communism. The danger today is an aggressive nationalism. It is the trouble which you get in Italy and South-Eastern Europe. It is the trouble which you get in the Balkans. It is the trouble which you have got on the Eastern Frontier of Germany, where there is a much more powerful party than the Communist party in favour of aggressive action. That is the trouble today, and into this troubled Europe...you throw this stone, this bone of contention. It is a leap in the dark and a leap into a whirlpool.
David Lloyd George
