The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.
Currently intellectuals in Western Europe and North America are extremely demoralized and shaken by the rise of a virulent conservative tendency (which some have even joined).
In this day and age, the U.S. and Europe do not have the luxury of focusing solely on a single region.
More than half of Americans have changed religions at least once in their adult lifetime. This is - the rate of religious conversion here is much, much higher than it is anywhere in Europe, for example.
If we wait for the U.S. to do something, we will be waiting for a very long time. It's Europe, it's Australia, it's the other developed and middle developing countries that have got to do the job.
In Europe, war is a disease which has been in the family for generations: no one is surprised when it makes another leap. Even the patient only attends to it with part of his mind.
One thing that has been fascinating to me is the exploding interest in traditional American barbecue in Europe. We Americans have historically always imported food ideas from other places, and now we are exporting this gastronomic treasure called barbecue.
America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.
The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. The Inquisition, the persecution of heretics and infidels and witches, they racked up pretty high death tolls.
I blew the college boards, and to ease the snub from Harvard made a tour of Europe.
We are hearing the imams that are preaching in places like the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. The imam preached there to the migrants go in to Western Europe, build your enclaves there, breed their women and do not associate or assimilate into the broader society.
When Americans talks about Europeans, they are thinking Britain and the rest of Europe. When we [ Britains] talk about Europeans, we talk about everywhere else.
The rest of Europe tends to be very comfortable with sexuality. The British and the Americans are kind of hung up about it.
At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe and the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful and all are true...This is a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue.
Even though we were influenced by American culture and music, we like the rest of Europe have been colonized with that in the post-war period. At the same time there's a sense of dirty earthiness and Europeanness and Britishness in it as well.
I'd like to take a motorcycle trip across Europe, maybe even across China. Of course I'd also like to broker a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it's important to put ceilings on one's ambitions.
I'm sure Church got some of his ideas from this trip to Europe.
President Bush has embarked on an eight-day tour of the continent. He hopes this one goes better than the other ones he's made recently. Obviously he's not doing that well in North America [on screen: '36% Approval'], his South American trip had a few bumps [on screen: 'Angry mobs of torch-carrying bumps'], Europe seems to think the president doesn't care what they think, but hey, who cares what they think? They could at least thank him for what he's done for their burning effigy industry.
All things start in California and spread to New Jersey, then to London and then throughout Europe.
America has its roots in a tradition of risk-taking pioneers. In more conservative Europe, if you fail in business or actually end up going to jail for it, you're finished as a businessman for good.
I'm looking forward to seeing more of the US, and hopefully spending some of the summer in Europe playing festivals. It's early days though, so who knows.
At this moment, everyone is in crisis, not only in Italy but all over Europe. Only in America do they make films that are successful all over the world. In Europe, production is quite poor. We have three or four or five films, which is not enough.
Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.
Without history we are infants. Ask what binds the British Isles more closely to America than to Europe and only history gives a reply. Of all intellectual pursuits, history is the most supremely useful. That is why people crave it and need ever more of it.
So, I am a b*stard, and the English are b*stards. But the really bad news is that you are too. My vision of Europe would be Europe of b*stards for whom the question of legitimacy was a site of endless struggle and contestation.
