Quotes & Sayings About European Union

The European Union's finished. It doesn't work. You know, we just had the honor in Britain of being the first country that rejected membership. You know, you could be next. It could be Denmark next. It could be Dexit. — Nigel Farage

Nationalism is war. - in arguing to strengthen the federal powers of the European Union — Francois Mitterrand

The single currency should allow the European Union, and therefore France, to balance its monetary strength with the United States. It should help us adjust to the development of China. — Laurent Fabius

I believe that there are better opportunities to keep people safe if we are outside the European Union. — Michael Gove

For the European Union, Russia is as important politically and economically as China is to the U.S. — Ivan Krastev

It has always struck me as the world's great fortune that the two great superpowers were the United States and the Soviet Union, who managed the Cold War with meticulous care in retrospect. Imagine the European diplomats of 1914 or 1938 armed with nuclear weapons. It is easy to believe they would not have been as cautious. — George Friedman

Terrorism is an evil that threatens all the countries in Europe. Vigorous cooperation in the European Union and worldwide is crucial in order to meet this evil head on. — Jan Peter Balkenende

This is about sending a very strong message that Scotland does want to stay in the European Union and we're an open country, a good place to live, work, study and to do business and it's really important as we take forward what will be challenging work ahead of us, that we send those messages. — Nicola Sturgeon

So, the international community are all the countries that are important: the United States definitely everywhere; the European Union because it is very important, and also, they do show a great deal of international responsibility; and then the local players. — Lakhdar Brahimi

A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today — George Orwell

To promote the process of European integration, we must improve an institutional mechanism already existing in the European Union, reinforced co-operation, by making it more flexible and effective. This approach allows a few states to move faster and further ... We are all aware that this mechanism is vital. — Lionel Jospin

We've stated very clearly that no negotiating chapters between the European Union and Turkey will be concluded before the Ankara Protocol is complied with: that's to say before Turkey grants all E.U. member states, including Cyprus, access to its ports. — Angela Merkel

I have specifically argued that we need to change our relationship with the European Union by fundamentally reforming not just our relationship but the European Union itself. — Michael Gove

When I saw how the European Union was developing, it was very obvious what they had in mind was not democratic. In Britain, you vote for a government so the government has to listen to you, and if you don't like it you can change it. — Tony Benn

Indeed, one view of the European debt crisis - the Greek street view - is that it is an elaborate attempt by the German government on behalf of its banks to get their money back without calling attention to what they are up to. The German government gives money to the European Union rescue fund so that it can give money to the Irish government so that the Irish government can give money to Irish banks, so the Irish banks can repay their loans to the German banks. "They are playing billiards," says Enderlein. "The easier way to do it would be to give German money to the German banks and let the Irish banks fail. — Michael Lewis

We need not to just kill the boat-smuggling business model: we also need to get rid of this asylum-shopping in the European Union. — Mark Rutte

If we get the capabilities, NATO, along with the European Union, can do amazing things. — Lord Robertson

The first two crusades brought the flower of European chivalry to Constantinople and restored that spiritual union between Eastern and Western Christendom that had been interrupted by the great schism of the Greek and Roman Churches. — Joseph Jacobs

Today, the European Union is busy transferring aid. If they can build infrastructure in Spain, roads, highways ... why do they refuse to use the same aid to build the same infrastructure in our countries? — Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

The British people have decided to leave. It is a sad decision but one which I respect. The vote puts the European Union in difficulties. It must recognise its shortfalls. — Francois Hollande

When an entire segment of the world is burned and reduced to a lawless battleground for thugs and mercenaries, a land where government does not exist, where the slate of history is being wiped out and hope has drowned in gallons of innocent blood, the only respite comes in the form of the open seas and what lies beyond the horizon. So ships are boarded and pain is tolerated just a little while longer. — Aysha Taryam

I can't foretell the future, but I don't believe that the act of leaving the European Union would make our economic position worse; I think it would make it better. — Michael Gove

There have been major disagreements within the European Union. — Jean-Pierre Raffarin

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown. — Dalai Lama

The people who are backing the Remain campaign are people who have done very well, thank you, out of the European Union. — Michael Gove

While the United States has largely been missing in action from the diplomatic game, the European Union and Iran have been making progress at developing a formula that would lead to the suspension of Iran's nuclear enrichment program and the start of serious negotiations. — Earl Blumenauer

The Conservatives are a confusing lot. They first denied climate change was a serious issue and then suggested strengthening the nuclear industry as a solution to it. They oppose the European Union, but support joining North American Free Trade Agreement, despite its obvious failure. — Zac Goldsmith

In order to be able to reduce migration we need to be outside the European Union. — Michael Gove

Regarding the visa-free regime, it has undoubtedly become a problem for the European Union, above all in terms of its capacity to reach agreements. — Sergei Lavrov

There are fifty American states, but they add up to one nation in a way the twenty-eight sovereign states of the European Union never can. Most of the EU states have a national identity far stronger, more defined, than any American state. It is easy to find a French person who is French first, European second, or one who pays little allegiance to the idea of Europe, but an American identifies with their Union in a way few Europeans do theirs. This is explained by the geography, and the history of the unification of the United States. — Tim Marshall

If we left the European Union, it would be a one-way ticket, not a return. So we will have time for a proper, reasoned debate. At the end of that debate you, the British people, will decide. — David Cameron

We want the United Kingdom to remain in the European Union. — Francois Hollande

Now, the entire world community recognizes Georgia. We are members of the United Nations and the Council of Europe. Everything is being prepared so that we will soon enter the European Union. — Eduard Shevardnadze

We work well together with the United Kingdom - particularly, perhaps, when we talk about new rules for the European Union. — Angela Merkel

Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumamism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be post-European. — Mark Steyn

Speaking from my experience as a person involved for a long time in building the European Union, it is important to have patience and efforts to build a community of nations. — Giorgio Napolitano

Turkey, with its political intolerance, as I have described it, is prepared to march forward, to break with its taboo about the Armenians, and is making great strides with respect to human rights and freedom of speech so that it can join the European Union. This alone shows how powerful the European idea is. — Orhan Pamuk

Europe is not old; it's rotten. Most Europeans are ignorant, racist, greedy and lazy. — Daniel Marques

Because with courage and conviction I believe we can deliver a more flexible, adaptable and open European Union in which the interests and ambitions of all its members can be met. — David Cameron

France would be reluctant to embrace any proposal by the European Commission to slash agricultural tariffs if it threatened the European Union's Common Agriculture Policy . — Christine Lagarde

After the Berlin Wall came down I visited that city and I will never forget it. The abandoned checkpoints. The sense of excitement about the future. The knowledge that a great continent was coming together. Healing those wounds of our history is the central story of the European Union. — David Cameron

My second job has been to try to use my power to create institutions of a modern state that could enter the European Union, and there was very little time. The door was closing, and I wanted to get Bosnia through before it shut. — Paddy Ashdown

The fact that we're going through a crisis is an opportunity for Europe to be more coordinated and more integrated. We're actually talking about a European Monetary Fund or euro bonds, about guarantees for countries, about economic governance in the European Union. That shows the strength of Europe. — George Papandreou

We want a comprehensive package that covers export subsidies, tariffs and overall levels of support. British Prime Minister Tony Blair is making central to his summit speech that he wants to abolish all export subsidies. It is up to him to push the European Union in that direction, and the U.S. needs to reciprocate. — Kevin Watkins

The crisis in Ukraine is all the European Union's fault. Its leaders negotiated a trade deal with Ukraine, which essentially blackmailed the country to choose between Europe and Russia, — Marine Le Pen

The "European Union" happens to be composed of people who hate our guts. It is the continent where Moveon-style lunatics are the friendly, pro-American types and the rest are crazy Muslims. — Ann Coulter

When the day comes that Tehran can announce its nuclear capability, every shred of international law will have been discarded. The mullahs have publicly sworn - to the United Nations and the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency - that they are not cheating. As they unmask their batteries, they will be jeering at the very idea of an 'international community.' How strange it is that those who usually fetishize the United Nations and its inspectors do not feel this shame more keenly. — Christopher Hitchens

Europe is no longer a Christian continent; few Europeans attend religious services on Sunday, and the European Union recently refused to refer to Europe's religious heritage in its fledgling constitution. — Meir Soloveichik

The European Union and environmental advocacy groups use global warming hysteria to advance their own special agendas. The European Union recognizes any significant reduction in CO2 emissions by the United States will significantly reduce its economic output, thereby bringing it closer to the inferior output of European nations. — Jay H. Lehr

The vast majority of Muslim residents of the United Kingdom voted to stay in the EU. And the balance of the British population voted to leave the European Union. — Rush Limbaugh

We shall divert through our own Country a branch of commerce which the European States have thought worthy of the most important struggles and sacrifices, and in the event of peace on terms which have been contemplated by some powers we shall form to the American union a barrier against the dangerous extension of the British Province of Canada and add to the Empire of liberty an extensive and fertile Country thereby converting dangerous Enemies into valuable friends. — Thomas Jefferson

Climate change is a crucial issue in todays global agenda. Hopefully, we will wake up to this reality, sooner rather than later. Pressure has been mounting on European Union Member States to act decisively to fight global warming. A bold target has been set reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 20 by 2020. — Joseph Muscat

The United States and the European Union do want to have a rule of law, and that rule of law should be for a fair trial. And that fair trial needs to have an impartial jury. — Maria Cantwell

I think that what started out as a European Union originally was probably a really wonderful and world-changing idea, the idea of a kind of cooperation and interdependence between countries. But the idea that individualization would work on common ground, not on conflict, not against each other, but to find how each benefitted from the other I thought was an incredibly hopeful and positive possibility. — Tavis Smiley

It's a European Union of economic failure, of mass unemployment and of low growth. — Nigel Farage

Kosovo's destiny is clearly to join the European Union at some point. — Emma Bonino

If you had said to anyone in 1945, at the end of the Second World War with the continent it ruins, that you could have a European Union of 28 member states stretching from Portugal in the West to Estonia in the East, all of them more-or-less liberal democracies - they wouldn't have believed you. — Timothy Garton Ash

Thanks to the euro, our pockets will soon hold solid evidence of a European identity. We need to build on this, and make the euro more than a currency and Europe more than a territory ... In the next six months, we will talk a lot about political union, and rightly so. Political union is inseparable from economic union. Stronger growth and Euorpean integration are related issues. In both areas we will take concrete steps forward. — Laurent Fabius

Outsiders became keen to join an organization [European Community] that offered attractive bribes to the poor. Greece did so in 1981 and Spain and Portugal in 1986. - written before 2003. — J.M. Roberts

You still hear some people speaking as though we could decide whether the Common market existed or not. — Hugh Gaitskell

Both France and Britain are supportive of India's bid for a broad-based agreement on trade and investment with the European Union. — Salman Khurshid

The United Kingdom and the European Union will remain indispensable partners of the United States even as they begin negotiating their ongoing relationship to ensure continued stability, security and prosperity for Europe, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the world. — Barack Obama

The country voted to leave the European Union, and it is the duty of the Government and of Parliament to make sure we do just that. — Theresa May

A descendent of Basque ranchers, the mayor came from the small circle of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century European immigrants who had been his father's oldest customers and friends. Perhaps Malburg told Jim the story of how Vernon got its start in 1905, when John Baptiste Leonis, a French Basque hog rancher, persuaded the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads to extend tracks to his city to attract new factories, their preferred freight-hauling customers. — Victor Valle

The European Army is our long-term goal. But first we have to strengthen the European Defence Union. — Angela Merkel

The UK is the number one destination in European Union for inward investment, the World Bank has ranked the UK as the sixth easiest place in he world to do business, so any organisation that makes promises about investment in the UK should live up to those promises. — James Brokenshire

We would like Serbia to become a member of the European Union as quickly as possible. — Ivica Dacic

If I had political responsibility, I would want to prepare for a plan B that would foresee that the European currency union, that the eurozone, no longer necessarily consists of 17 member states. And that means to make provisions so that other countries are not pulled into the maelstrom through contagion. — Peer Steinbruck

The Kalergi Plan In short, Kalergi is still held in very high, near mythical esteem and the policy of the Kalergi Plan was and still is the basis of official European Union government policy aimed at Cultural, Political and Genetic genocide of the Peoples of Europe, through a full implementation of all seven stages of the Multicultural concept. — Citizen One

Strasser hoped to replace the Programme of 1920. In November, he took the first steps in composing the Community's own draft programme. It advocated a racially integrated German nation at the heart of a central European customs union, the basis of a united states of Europe. — Ian Kershaw

I will not say the fact that there are no European Union observers at an election means that it will not be fair and free. — Olusegun Obasanjo

The European Union Treaty ... within a few years will lead to the creation of what the founding fathers of modern Europe dreamed of after the war, the United States of Europe. — Helmut Kohl

The biggest danger to the European Union comes not from those who advocate change, but from those who denounce new thinking as heresy. In its long history Europe has experience of heretics who turned out to have a point. — David Cameron

One of the reasons I decided to apply for American citizenship after something like a quarter of century of living here on a British, European Union passport and a green card, was my identification with the United States in the post-September 11th period. — Christopher Hitchens

[European Union] a giant cartel that suits big multinationals. — Nigel Farage

The Arab Spring whose seeds failed to bloom anything other than a chaotic mess that requires only blood to grow has contributed immensely to the rising numbers of these migrants. — Aysha Taryam

Having the United Kingdom in the European Union gives us much greater confidence about the strength of the transatlantic union and is part of the cornerstone of institutions built after World War II that has made the world safer and more prosperous. — Barack Obama

The European Union, which is not directly responsible to voters, provides an irresistible opportunity for European elites to seize power in order to impose their own vision on a newly socially regimented Europe. — Maggie Gallagher

For the institutions of the European Union are at present incomplete. A European Senate is badly needed to complete them. By creating an upper chamber in the European parliament, a new bridge could be built between national political classes, which retain democratic legitimacy, and the decision-making process in Brussels. Such a Senate should be recruited by indirect election from exisiting national parliaments. — Larry Siedentop

China is not only formidable, it is also aggressively building its own economic infrastructure. Just a few years from now, China will rival the U.S. and the European Union in global market power. It already has surpassed us in population. — Jo Ann Emerson

I think it's extremely unlikely that the European Union will fracture with nations dropping off the edge. — John Major

If we leave the European Union, there will be an immediate economic shock that will hit financial markets. People will not know what the future looks like. — George Osborne

What is now the EU was set up so that France and Germany could hug each other so tightly in a loving embrace that neither would be able to get an arm free with which to punch the other. — Tim Marshall

I felt it was vital to stress the importance of national security in this debate and the need for a clear path to our exit from the European Union. I hope I have achieved both these objectives. — Liam Fox

Europe needs a boundary like a fish needs a bicycle. — Yanko Tsvetkov

By the way, the European Union Member States together - even the euro area Member States together - are by far the biggest contributors to the IMF. — Jose Manuel Barroso

We've been a bit too defensive about the European Union rules. We don't want to become protectionist and nationalist in the way we buy things but we think we could do a lot more to promote British business through procurement. — Vince Cable

We believe in a flexible union of free member states who share treaties and institutions and pursue together the ideal of co-operation, to represent and promote the values of European civilisation in the world, advance our shared interests by using our collective power to open markets, and to build a strong economic base across the whole of Europe. — David Cameron

The Christian religion alone contemplates the conjugal union in the order of nature; it is the only religion which presents woman to man as a companion; every other abandons her to him as a slave. To religion alone do European women owe their liberty. — Jacques-Henri Bernardin De Saint-Pierre

I think it is one of the fundamentals, not only of the European Union but also of free trade, that competition is fair. — Margrethe Vestager

Here we have the Schengen agreement, and the truth is that for years we trusted each other and set border controls on the outer borders of the European Union. And as was the case with the economic and monetary union, with this step, regarding the management of the Schengen area, we did not go all the way in terms of political solutions. — Angela Merkel

The integration of Europe was very much led by a Germany that was always willing to pay a little bit extra to reach a compromise that everybody accepted, because Germany was so eager to get European support for reunification. That was called the "farsighted vision," which created the European Union. — George Soros

An EU without Britain, without 1 of Europe's strongest powers, a country which in many ways invented the single market, and which brings real heft to Europe's influence on the world stage which plays by the rules and which is a force for liberal economic reform would be a very different kind of European Union. — David Cameron

It would be a very serious mistake for the U.K. to vote to leave the European Union, and I think it would be democratically indefensible for Scotland, if we had voted to stay in, to face the prospect of being taken out. — Nicola Sturgeon

We don't want protectionism at the heart of the European Union. — Guy Verhofstadt

Today, hundreds of millions dwell in freedom, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, from the Western Approaches to the Aegean. And while we must never take this for granted, the first purpose of the European Union - to secure peace - has been achieved and we should pay tribute to all those in the EU, alongside Nato, who made that happen. — David Cameron

I dispute the right of conservatives to be automatically complacent on these points. My own Marxist group took a consistently anti-Moscow line throughout the 'Cold War,' and was firm in its belief that that Soviet Union and its European empire could not last. Very few people believed that this was the case: The best known anti-Communist to advance the proposition was the great Robert Conquest, but he himself insists that part of the credit for such prescience goes to Orwell. More recently, a very exact prefiguration of the collapse of the USSR was offered by two German Marxists, one of them from the West (Hans Magnus Enzensberger) and one from the East (Rudolf Bahro, the accuracy of whose prediction was almost uncanny). I have never met an American conservative who has even heard of, let alone read, either of these authors. — Christopher Hitchens

What is interesting is that the term Aryan was adopted by the Nazis and Adolf Hitler in the early 20th century to describe a people group they deemed as purely Germanic (must be of one people group) and more "evolved" than the rest of European peoples and the rest of the world. And yet, the true Aryans were one of the most famous groups of people who were of mixed descent. Hitler and the Nazis were playing off of Charles Darwin's model of higher and lower races. This idea, claimed by this humanistic religion, has been a cause of terrible atrocities in WWI, WWII, and mass exterminations of people by leaders like Stalin (Soviet Union) and Mao (China), among others. — Bodie Hodge

The Czech Republic, severed from its old Slovak half, sits in apparent landlocked contentment, inside the European Union but outside the troubled Euro Zone, set into the new Continental mosaic like one of the small sturdy paving stones, just a few inches square, that form the sidewalks under the visitor's ambling feet. — Thomas Mallon

This is what the European Union is all about. A strong market with a strong currency. — Mark Rutte