Home > Work > Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe QUOTES

Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe QUOTES

1 " Elsewhere I have argued that civilizations are divided into three phases. The first phase is barbarism, a time when people believe that the laws of their own village are the laws of nature, as George Bernard Shaw put it. The second phase is civilization, where people continue to believe in the justice of their ways but harbor openness to the idea that they might be in error. The third phase, decadence, is the moment in which people come to believe that there is no truth, or that all lies are equally true. "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

2 " In some sense, the military is the most modern part of a developing country. "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

3 " Nations do not become strong because they feel like it but because they must. "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

4 " And from this story I learned about the geopolitics of taking out one’s salami. "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

5 " Europe is in an economic crisis. Germany is the wealthiest country in Europe and it benefits the most from Europe. However, the German public doesn’t want to pay for what they see as Greek indolence and corruption. "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

6 " The Enlightenment sought to rid the world of myths, but the nation could not justify itself without them. "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

7 " In the end, the problem of Europe is the same problem that haunted its greatest moment, the Enlightenment. It is the Faustian spirit, the desire to possess everything even at the cost of their souls. "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

8 " As the global powers diverge and Europe is caught in the middle, the lack of hard power will matter more and more. Being rich and weak is a dangerous combination. Europe therefore lives in a world of wolves. "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

9 " It is interesting to note that Copernicus was German/Polish, Luther was German, and Gutenberg was German. "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

10 " since the EU was created, there have been more wars in Europe than between 1945 and 1992. Many "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

11 " In the fog of history and myth, the American role in championing and underwriting European integration is frequently forgotten, along with the resistance of the Europeans. "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

12 " Islam invaded Europe twice from the Mediterranean - first in Iberia, the second time in southeastern Europe, as well as nibbling at Sicily and elsewhere. Christianity invaded Islam multiple times, the first time in the Crusades and in the battle to expel the Muslims from Iberia. Then it forced the Turks back from central Europe. The Christians finally crossed the Mediterranean in the 19th century, taking control of large parts of North Africa. Each of these two religions wanted to dominate the other. Each seemed close to its goal. Neither was successful. What remains true is that Islam and Christianity were obsessed with each other from the first encounter. Like Rome and Egypt they traded with each other and made war on each other. "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

13 " It is good, as I have said, to be neither victim nor victimizer. Unfortunately, it is not possible. What "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

14 " At the end of the war American and Soviet troops massed throughout most of the European peninsula, with Americans also in Britain and the British in Europe. The peninsula was occupied, shattered and exhausted, no longer the arbiter of its own fate. "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

15 " The European peninsula was occupied by the United States and the Soviet Union, its sovereignty compromised. Over the next decades its empire would disintegrate and its global power disappear. "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

16 " In 711 Muslim armies went north into Spain, ultimately occupying it and crossing the Pyrenees into France. In 732 Charles Martel, in a defining battle, defeated the Muslim armies, forcing them back behind the mountains and confining them to the Iberian Peninsula. Had Martel lost that battle, Europe would have been a very different place. "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

17 " It is hardest to write on the Holocaust. It had no military purpose. While everything else Hitler did could, with some strain, be fitted with some military logic, the industrialized killing of 6 million Jews and millions of others could not be. A place like Auschwitz did nothing to help with the war effort and used up massive resources, if not for food for the inmates, then for manpower, trains, and the rest. But "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

18 " It mattered a great deal who occupied your country. The "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

19 " In 732 Charles Martel, in a defining battle, defeated the Muslim armies, forcing them back behind the mountains and confining them to the Iberian Peninsula. Had Martel lost that battle, Europe would have been a very different place. It "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

20 " The nation provided a human with the things that are most human—language and a past that stretched back before his birth. "

― George Friedman , Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe