George S. Patton Jr.  - Quotes

 The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.

 

Tags: europe     


Christopher Hitchens  - Quotes

 Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building 

Tags: agriculture   analogies   arabs   colonialism   crusades   europe   history   injustice   israel   jaffa   jews   palestine   palestinians   victims   washington     
Mahatma Gandhi  - Quotes

 Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act which deprived a whole nation of arms as the blackest. 

Tags: armies   asia   conquest   england   europe   history   india   strategies   weapons     


Elizabeth Kostova  - Quotes

 It touched me to be trusted with something terrible. 

Tags: atmospheric   dark   dracula   european   fiction   historian   historical   horror   moody   vampire     
Christopher Hitchens  - Quotes

 It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again.



This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece Watership Down is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since The Wind in the Willows, but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.
 

Tags: 1960s   countryside   cruelty   england   europe   gassing   hampshire   hiroshima   literature   mansions   massacre   meadow   myxomatosis   napoleon   quiet   rabbits   silence   sussex   townships   women     
Christopher Hitchens  - Quotes

 Should I, too, prefer the title of 'non-Jewish Jew'? For some time, I would have identified myself strongly with the attitude expressed by Rosa Luxemburg, writing from prison in 1917 to her anguished friend Mathilde Wurm:



What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball 

Tags: 1917   africa   africans   europeans   internationalism   jews   marxism   plantations   prison   race   racism   suffering   victims     
David Sedaris  - Quotes

 In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren't enough euros to go around.  

Tags: asia   cashiers   europe   euros   hospitality   japan   paris   tokyo     
Rosa Luxemburg  - Quotes

 What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball 

Tags: africa   africans   antisemitism   compassion   empathy   europeans   internationalism   jews   plantations   racism     
Roman Payne  - Quotes

 I regained my soul through literature after those times I'd lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets. 

Tags: books   europe   fortune   fortunes   gypsies   gypsy   literature   payne   reading   roman   soul   streets     
Adam Grossberg  - Quotes

 Actually 

Tags: arabs   britain   colonialism   europe   irony   israel   jews   land   palestine   religion   turkey   zionism     
Thomas Keneally  - Quotes

 High Europe always played at ethnic contempt because it was High Europe, and so had the strength, the authority, to make the racial rules. We great unwashed of the outer world, on the coasts of new continents, though we might ourselves have behaved atrociously to indigenes, were baffled by the determination with which Europe returned to the frenzies of racial myth. Nice boys and not-so-nice boys took up the theme, put on the uniform, did the dirty work. 

Tags: ethics   europe   race     
Terry Pratchett  - Quotes

 My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.

My dream holiday would be a) a ticket to Amsterdam b) immunity from prosecution and c) a baseball bat.
 

Tags: europe   holidays   humor   traffic     
Ralph Waldo Emerson  - Quotes

 We go to Europe to be Americanized. 

Tags: europe     
Jeffrey Eugenides  - Quotes

 Aloft, he looked frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a European to look.  

Tags: europeans     
Adam Hochschild  - Quotes

 Most striking about the traditional societies of the Congo was their remarkable artwork: baskets, mats, pottery, copper and ironwork, and, above all, woodcarving. It would be two decades before Europeans really noticed this art. Its discovery then had a strong influence on Braque, Matisse, and Picasso -- who subsequently kept African art objects in his studio until his death. Cubism was new only for Europeans, for it was partly inspired by specific pieces of African art, some of them from the Pende and Songye peoples, who live in the basin of the Kasai River, one of the Congo's major tributaries.



It was easy to see the distinctive brilliance that so entranced Picasso and his colleagues at their first encounter with this art at an exhibit in Paris in 1907. In these central African sculptures some body parts are exaggerated, some shrunken; eyes project, cheeks sink, mouths disappear, torsos become elongated; eye sockets expand to cover almost the entire face; the human face and figure are broken apart and formed again in new ways and proportions that had previously lain beyond sight of traditional European realism.



The art sprang from cultures that had, among other things, a looser sense than Islam or Christianity of the boundaries between our world and the next, as well as those between the world of humans and the world of beasts. Among the Bolia people of the Congo, for example, a king was chosen by a council of elders; by ancestors, who appeared to him in a dream; and finally by wild animals, who signaled their assent by roaring during a night when the royal candidate was left at a particular spot in the rain forest. Perhaps it was the fluidity of these boundaries that granted central Africa's artists a freedom those in Europe had not yet discovered.
 

Tags: africa   congo   europe     


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