Balkan Ghosts Quotes

“Romania was an original mix: a population that looked Italian but wore the expressions of Russian peasants; an architectural backdrop that often evoked France and Central Europe; and service and physical conditions that resembled those in Africa.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History

“Macedonia, the inspiration for the French word for "mixed salad" (macedoine), defines the principle illness of the Balkans: conflicting dreams of lost imperial glory. Each nation demands that is borders revert to where they were at the exact time when its own empire had reached its zenith of ancient medieval expansion.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts

“The train passed through a series of tunnels. Because the overhead light fixtures had no bulbs in them, some people lit candles inside the tunnels, which dramatically illuminated their black, liquid eyes. There was a solemn, almost devotional cynicism to these eyes, reflecting, as though by a genetic process, all of the horrors witnessed by generation upon generation of forebears.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts

“And believe me, there is nobody who hates Communism more than a former Communist.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History

“Communism would exit the world stage revealed for what it truly was: fascism, without fascism’s ability to make the trains run on time.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts

“spent his adult life concerned much more with the imperfections of American society than with America’s place in the world. Books are misused when the reader lacks context.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History

“Croatia and Serbia will always seek to advance the interests of their ethnic compatriots in Bosnia, at the expense of each other and of the Bosnian Muslims, no matter who is in charge, democrat or autocrat. But”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History

“The revolution was a gift from God to the Romanian people. The Romanian people must now repay this gift by opening their hearts to people of all faiths, especially to those who suffered here in the past.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History

“A better age would have to follow.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts

“wanted to know how five years of Nazism followed by four and a half decades of Stalinism had affected this landscape and the people who inhabited it.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History

“seep in, with its physical cruelty, economic exploitation, and barren”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History