Ex Yugoslavia Quotes & Sayings

We were in an awkward position against Yugoslavia in that in order to win we needed to score more goals than they did. — Jose Antonio Camacho

Aside from being a Latina, my family immigrated from Puerto Rico and Yugoslavia so I know all about that. I wouldn't be able to do what I do today if they didn't come to America. Everybody has an immigration story. — Naya Rivera

You know, in each segment of ex-Yugoslavia, multi-ethnic life is lost, except I think we somehow still have this in Serbia. — Emir Kusturica

Suppose the elections are free and fair and those elected are racists, fascists, separatists", said the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke about Yugoslavia in 1990s. "that is the dilemma — Fareed Zakaria

I am a lawyer, and for me it is very sad to say that there is now law here. There are weapons rather than law. What did Mao say? Power comes out of the barrel of a gun. It's very true. The situation is decadent. A lot of Serbs think this is leading us nowhere but they feel powerless. How many disagree? I don't know. Perhaps thirty percent disagree, but most of them are frightened and quiet. Perhaps sixty percent agree or are confused enough to go along. They are led by the ten percent who have the guns and who have control of the television towers. That's all they need.'

p. 107 — Peter Maass

I was born on July 23rd, 1906, in Sarajevo in the province of Bosnia, which then belonged to the Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy and later, in 1918, became part of Yugoslavia. — Vladimir Prelog

I feel absolutely no loyalty to Serbian, Croatian, or Bosnian national causes. I have no other emotion but utter contempt for people who helped destroy Yugoslavia, and I feel the same about the people who are now selling what is left of it." (p. 13) — Andrej Grubacic

Better to be an honourable man than a minister of state. — Milovan Djilas

Clare Short, who today poses as an anti-war warrior but was six years ago Blair's cheerleader-in-chief for bombing Yugoslavia. After the attack on Radio-Televizija Jugoslavenska she said, 'The propaganda machine is prolonging the war and it's a legitimate target'. Amnesty International pointed out 'intentionally directing attacks against civilian objects is a war crime under the Rome Statutes of the International Criminal Court'. — Tony Benn

Yugoslavia and Serbia will fight against terrorists regardless of whether a political agreement is reached or not. — Ivica Dacic

And rivaling the Democratic Peace theory as a categorical factoid about modern conflict prevention is the Golden Arches theory: no two countries with a McDonald's have ever fought in a war. The only unambiguous Big Mac Attack took place in 1999, when NATO briefly bombed Yugoslavia.234 — Steven Pinker

Sometimes girls write me. One girl in Yugoslavia sent me a whole slew of love letters. I don't know how she got my address. She was in a crowd watching me play. She says when I left there the stars fell out of the sky over Yugoslavia, or something like that. — Bobby Fischer

Cruelty is absolutely foreign to their natures.Some people once talked of setting up a branch of the " Prevention of Cruelty to Animals" in Serbia, and were asked in astonishment what work they supposed they would find to do ; who ever heard of a Serbian being cruel to child or animal? — Flora Sandes

The many questions about the bombing of Yugoslavia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation - meaning primarily the United States - come down to two fundamental issues: 'What are the accepted and applicable 'rules of world order,' and how do these apply in the case of Kosovo?' — Noam Chomsky

How can I play baseball if I'm stupid? If I was stupid I wouldn't have pitched in the World Series. I'd be playing ball in Mexico or Yugoslavia or on Pluto. — Joaquin Andujar

This soup is as cold as the sea! But he was not shouting at the soup. He was shouting at the Turks, at the Venetians, at the Austrians, at the French, and at the Serbs (if he was Croat) or at the Croats (if he was a Serb). — Rebecca West

The decision to attack the entire nation [of Yugoslavia] has been counterproductive, and our destruction of civilian life has now become senseless and excessively brutal ... The United States' insistence on the use of cluster bombs, designed to kill or maim humans, is condemned almost universally and brings discredit on our nation (as does our refusal to support a ban on land mines). Even for the world's only superpower, the ends don't always justify the means. — Jimmy Carter

So as far as Serbia is concerned, it does not have the right to influence the privatization or to claim any property, because Kosovo is a former member of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. — Ibrahim Rugova

Srebrenica was officially 'protected' not just by UN mandate but by a 400-strong peacekeeping contingent of armed Dutch soldiers. But when Mladic's men arrived the Dutch battalion laid down its arms and offered no resistance whatsoever as Serbian troops combed the Muslim community, systematically separating men and boys from the rest. The next day, after Mladic had given his 'word of honor as an officer' that the men would not be harmed, his soldiers marched the Muslim males, including boys as young as thirteen, out into the fields around Srebrenica. In the course of the next four days nearly all of them - 7,400 - were killed. The Dutch soldiers returned safely home to Holland. — Tony Judt

Well, you know, in America everybody is interested in making the dollar fast. In Yugoslavia no matter how much you hustle you're not going to get rich, so you might as well play chess. — Bobby Fischer

We are three countries that emerged from the former Yugoslavia - countries that are now in transition and must cooperate with each other, because our economies depend on each other. — Stjepan Mesic

We're not trying to recreate Yugoslavia — Chris Patten

The food in Yugoslavia is fine if you like pork tartare. — Ed Begley Jr.

The Soviet Union suffered 65 percent of all Allied military deaths, China 23 percent, Yugoslavia 3 percent, the United States and Britain 2 percent each, France and Poland 1 percent each. About 8 percent of all Germans died, compared with 2 percent of Chinese, 3.44 percent of Dutch people, 6.67 percent of Yugoslavs, 4 percent of Greeks, 1.35 percent of French, 3.78 percent of Japanese, 0.94 percent of British and 0.32 percent of Americans. Within the armed forces, 30.9 percent of Germans conscripted into the Wehrmacht died, — Max Hastings

[ ... ] I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China and continue my profession.'
'As sanitary engineer?'
'No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries in the world. — Bruce Chatwin

I never wanted an independent Bosnia. I wanted Yugoslavia. That is my country. — Emir Kusturica

The Soviet Union came apart along ethnic lines. The most important factor in this breakup was the disinclination of Slavic Ukraine to continue under a regime dominated by Slavic Russia. Yugoslavia came apart also, beginning with a brutal clash between Serbia and Croatia, here again 'nations' with only the smallest differences in genealogy; with, indeed, practically a common language. Ethnic conflict does not require great differences; small will do. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

In this city, the victors had delusions of grandeur. It was visual. Across the street from the hotel stood City Hall, sporting an oversized Serb flag that hung from the roof to the ground, a hundred feet tall, fifty feet wide, three horizontal stripes of blue, white and red, so large that only a strong breeze could make it flap. The flag, hanging over a building where, fifty years earlier, Kurt Waldheim worked as a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht, was meant as a projection of Serb nationalism, as though size were all that mattered, rather than content. I had never thought of flags as weapons, but in Bosnia, as in the rest of Europe, they were becoming the deadliest weapons of all.

p. 80 — Peter Maass

The peoples of Yugoslavia do not want Fascism. They do not want a totalitarian regime, they do not want to become slaves of the German and Italian financial oligarchy as they never wanted to become reconciled to the semi-colonial dependence imposed on them by the so-called Western democracies after the first imperialist war. — Josip Broz Tito

Bosnia's war had its visual hallmarks. Parks that were turned into cemeteries, refugee families piled onto horse-drawn carts, stop-or-die checkpoints with mines across the road. The most hideous hallmark of all was the blackened patch of ground in the center of town. It always meant the same thing, a destroyed mosque. The goal of ethnic cleansing was not simply to get rid of Muslims; it was to destroy all traces that they had ever lived in Bosnia. The goal was to kill history. If you want to do that, then you must rip out history's heart, which in the case of Bosnia's Muslim community meant the destruction of its mosques. Once that was done, you could reinvent the past in whatever distorted form you wanted, like Frankenstein.

p. 85 — Peter Maass

During the war, a battle was fought here, not only for the creation of a new Yugoslavia, but also a battle for Bosnia and Herzegovina as a sovereign republic. To some generals and leaders their position on this was not quite clear. I never once doubted my stance on Bosnia. I always said that Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot belong to this or that, only to the people that lived there since the beginning of time. — Josip Broz Tito

In Globetrotter, David Albahari explores the consciousness of emigres from the former Yugoslavia, Croatia and Serbia, showing that while abroad, many of us are even more intensely preoccupied with our histories than we were while living in Yugoslavia. His narrative structured out of realistic details and perceptions with self-conscious meditation blending history, civilization and its discontents, and personal experience reaches a density and intensity akin to Krasznahorkai's and Thomas Bernhard's. An intensely idiosyncratic narrative, enjoyable and thoughtful. — Josip Novakovich

There is only one superpower now and it doesn't know what to do with its status. As a result, we got Yugoslavia and Iraq, and the situation has only got worse. — Mikhail Gorbachev

None of our republics would be anything if we weren't all together; but we have to create our own history - history of United Yugoslavia, also in the future. — Josip Broz Tito