Habsburg Quotes & Sayings

As the Habsburg military used to say, the situation is catastrophic, but not serious. — Theodore Dalrymple

During the first six years of my life, Hungary was one of the most important components of the Habsburg dynasty's vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, but after World War I it became an independent national entity. — Georg Solti

The authors (Habsburg military personnel) invariably show some surprise when recounting a respectable performance of a regiment during its Italian period and are forced to admit, somewhat reluctantly, that the Italians were not such bad soldiers after all. [I think this quote is hilarious, especially when imagining Tommaso's reaction.] — Lawrence Sondhaus

When the Habsburg State crumbled to pieces in 1918 the Austrian Germans instinctively raised an outcry for union with their German fatherland. That was the voice of a unanimous yearning in the hearts of the whole people for a return to the unforgotten home of their fathers. — Adolf Hitler

You may come as a proud prince today young Habsburg. But you shall travel many more roads in Castile in death than you ever will in life — C.W. Gortner

By the middle twentieth century, few European nation-states had not at one time or another figured themselves as 'the outpost of Western Christian civilisation': France, imperial Germany, the Habsburg Reich, Poland with its self-image as przedmurze (bastion), even tsarist Russia. Each of these nation-state myths identified "barbarism" as the condition or ethic of their immediate eastward neighbour: for the French, the Germans were barbarous, for the Germans it was the Slavs, for the Poles the Russians, for the Russians the Mongol and Turkic peoples of Central Asia and eventually the Chinese. — Neal Ascherson

Our task as historians is to make past conflicts live again; not to lament the verdict or to wish for a different one. It bewildered me when my old master A. F. Pribram, a very great historian, said in the nineteen-thirties: 'It is still not decided whether the Habsburg monarchy could have found a solution for its national problems.' How can we decide about something that did not happen? Heaven knows, we have difficulty enough in deciding what did happen. Events decided that the Habsburgs had not found a solution for their national problems; that is all we know or need to know. Whenever I read the phrase: 'whether so-and-so acted rightly must be left for historians to decide', I close the book; the writer has moved from history to make-believe. — A.J.P. Taylor