“Europe owes its greatness to the fact that the primary loyalties of the European people have been detached from religion and re-attached to the land. Those who believe that the division of Europe into nations has been the primary cause of European wars should remember the devastating wars of religion that national loyalties finally brought to an end. And they should study our art and literature for its inner meaning. In almost every case, they will discover, it is an art and literature not of war but of peace, an invocation of home and the routines of home, of gentleness, everydayness and enduring settlement.”

England and the Need for Nations (2006)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Roger Scruton45

English philosopher 1944–2020

Thomas Cahill book How the Irish Saved Civilization

Source: How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995), Ch. VI What Was Found

“The end of the negotiations is a blow to the cause of the wider European unity for which we have been striving. We are a part of Europe, by geography, history, culture, tradition and civilization … There have been times in the history of Europe when it has been only too plain how European we are; and there have been many millions of people who have been grateful for it. I say to my colleagues: they should have no fear. We in Britain are not going to turn out backs on the mainland of Europe or the countries of the Community.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech at European conference after France vetoed the British application to join the EEC (28 January 1963), quoted in Edward Heath, The Course of My Life (Hodder and Stoughton, 1998), p. 235.
Lord Privy Seal

“The idea that the citizen owes loyalty to a country, a territory, a jurisdiction and all those who reside within it — the root assumption of democratic politics, and one that depends upon the nation as its moral foundation - that idea has no place in the minds and hearts of many who now call themselves citizens of European states.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

England and the Need for Nations (2006)

“My objective is that before the end of the millennium Europe should have a true federation. The Commission should become a political executive which can define essential common interests…responsible before the European Parliament and before the nation-states represented how you will, by the European Council or by a second chamber of national parliaments.”

Jacques Delors (1925) French economist and politician

Remarks on French television. (23 January 1990), quoted in Charles Grant, Delors - Inside the House that Jacques Built (London: Nicholas Brearley, 1994), p. 135.

“I am one of the servants of Allah. We do our duty of fighting for the sake of the religion of Allah. It is also our duty to send a call to all the people of the world to enjoy this great light and to embrace Islam and experience the happiness in Islam. Our primary mission is nothing but the furthering of this religion. … Let not the West be taken in by those who say that Muslims choose nothing but slaughtering. Their brothers in East Europe, in Turkey and in Albania have been guided by Allah to submit to Islam and to experience the bliss of Islam. Unlike those, the European and the American people and some of the Arabs are under the influence of Jewish media.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

1990s, ABC interview (1998)

“Those who believe Europe is for the world have never explained why this process should be one way: why Europeans going anywhere else in the world is colonialism whereas the rest of the world coming to Europe is just and fair.”

Douglas Murray (1979) British political commentator and far-right activist

The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam (2017)

“It was in the Second World War, then, that the full force of the modern European state was mobilized for the first time, for the primary purpose of conquering and exploiting other Europeans.”

Tony Judt (1948–2010) British historian

Chap. 1 : The Legacy of War
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005)

“The nation state has never been associated with peace on earth. Its most powerful recommendation and record is, as a matter of fact, as a wager of war. The history of nation states is written around the dates of war, not peace, around arms and not arts. The organization of warfare without the coercive power of the nation state is simply unimaginable at the scale with which we have become familiar.”

Karl Hess (1923–1994) American journalist

Foreword (1984) to The Market for Liberty (1970)

“We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Hellas

Preface
Hellas (1821)

“The war which is being waged today by the German armed forces under the highest command of Adolf Hitler is a war of an immense reform. It does not only overcome the world of ideas of the French Revolution, but it also exterminates directly all those racially infecting germs of Jewry and its bastards, which now since over a hundred years could develop without check among the European nations. The Jew question, which for 2000 years was a problem for the European nations which was not solved, will now find its solution through the national socialistic revolution for Germany and whole Europe.”

Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946) German architect and politician

“The Jewish Question as a World Problem,”, Radio Broadcast, 28 March 1941. Quoted in Roderick Stackelberg, Sally A. Winkle, The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts. Routledge, 2013 (pp. 337-8).

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Roger Scruton45

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