“Europe is only powerful; India is beautiful.”
Savitri Devi, L'Etang aux Lotus, p. 222, quoted in Koenraad Elst: The Saffron Swastika, p. 562
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Savitri Devi 7
Greek–French writer 1905–1982Related quotes
Wall Street Journal, WSJ http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/04/04/rahul-gandhi-speech-hits-some-dud-notes/
Quoted in Shirali, Aresh (10 August 2017). "The Enigma of Aligarh" https://openthemagazine.com/freedom-issue-2017/freedom-issue-2017-dispatches-from-history/the-enigma-of-aligarh/. Open Magazine.
Variant: "India is like a bride which has got two beautiful and lustrous eyes—Hindus and Mussulmans. If they quarrel against each other that beautiful bride will become ugly and if one destroys the other, she will lose one eye." Writings and Speeches of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan https://books.google.com/books?id=ausHAAAAMAAJ, p. 160.
Source: 1910s, Fear God and Take Your Own Part (1916), p. 70
Context: Christianity is not the creed of Asia and Africa at this moment solely because the seventh century Christians of Asia and Africa had trained themselves not to fight, whereas the Moslems were trained to fight. Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought. If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, an on up to and including the seventeenth century, had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be exterminated. Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor...... The civilization of Europe, American and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization because of victories through the centuries from Charles Martel in the eighth century and those of John Sobieski in the seventeenth century. During the thousand years that included the careers of the Frankish soldier and the Polish king, the Christians of Asia and Africa proved unable to wage successful war with the Moslem conquerors; and in consequence Christianity practically vanished from the two continents; and today, nobody can find in them any "social values" whatever, in the sense in which we use the words, so far as the sphere of Mohammedan influences are concerned. There are such "social values" today in Europe, America and Australia only because during those thousand years, the Christians of Europe possessed the warlike power to do what the Christians of Asia and Africa had failed to do — that is, to beat back the Moslem invader.
Speech to the European Parliament (19 January 1995), quoted in The Times (20 January 1995), p. 11
President of the European Commission
Letter to Lord Holland (9 January 1804), quoted in L. G. Mitchell, Charles James Fox (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 194.
1800s
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), Scholium Generale (1713; 1726)
Source: The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy
Context: This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. And if the fixed Stars are the centers of other like systems, these being form'd by the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One; especially, since the light of the fixed Stars is of the same nature with the light of the Sun, and from every system light passes into all the other systems. And lest the systems of the fixed Stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other mutually, he hath placed those Systems at immense distances one from another.
Fyodor Dostoevsky in a letter to his Niece Sofia Alexandrovna, Geneva, January 1, 1868. Ethel Golburn Mayne (1879), Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoyevsky to His Family and Friends http://www.archive.org/stream/lettersoffyodorm00dostiala/lettersoffyodorm00dostiala_djvu.txt, Dostoevsky's Letters XXXIX, p. 136.
