Adriatic Quotes

“Thus, while the Orthodox world claims universality as the original “true belief” about God, in practice it has become associated with ethnic nations and regimes, good and bad.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“whereas the Catholic Church is unified under a pope, the Orthodox world is more an assemblage of “independent local Churches” that are “highly flexible” and “easily adapted to changing conditions.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“There is nothing like a sea voyage to restore one’s sense of optimism, a sense of being cleansed of your own past. This may be the real reason people buy sailboats.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“From Zagreb to Rijeka now takes ninety minutes, to Senj two hours, and so forth. Because of the collapse of distance effected by civil engineering—to say nothing of the explosion of global tourism along the Dalmatian seaboard—Croatia has changed both economically and, to an extent, psychologically. Croatia has begun to move away from a more ethnically obsessed Balkan orientation in the direction of a more cosmopolitan Mediterranean one.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“For it is the books you have read, as much as the people you have met, that constitute autobiography.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“Trieste, with its intimacy and multiple identities, making it so hard to categorize, can reduce the mass to the quirky individual in the true Joycean spirit.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“Europe, sheltered under an American security umbrella, for a long time believed itself morally superior to America while protected by it at the same time.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“The pseudo-communist Left is hip and radical chic, with its NGOs and fashionable causes. That draws the wealthy and attractive people. The poor, meanwhile, are attracted to the ethnic nationalism of the Right.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“Throughout the Cold War, for example, America had paid the security bill so that European societies could afford generous social welfare states. America also protected Europe from the Soviet Union, whose internal chaos for a decade after its demise did not much affect Europe either. But now, along with the millions of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, quasi-Asiatic Russia threatens to slowly undermine Europe, just as some of the early modern philosophers feared.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“Russia’s interest in Montenegro is also wrought by Russia’s considerable history of cultural and linguistic ties to Serbian-speaking territories, to its economic investments here, and to the fact that this beautiful Adriatic resort has become a playground for Russian organized crime.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“recall how Yale history professor Marci Shore found the ideal of Europe in an indoor market as far east as the port of Odessa, where musicians from the local philharmonic were playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—the anthem of the European Union—amid the “scaling of whitefish and cleaning of mackerel gills and weighing of anchovies…drowning, for a moment, the voices of Putin’s sirens” in the midst of the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution.[4] Because Europe, in order to survive, should mean more than a specific geography, it cannot be too strictly limited by geography, and so must try to reach out to its shadow zones.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“It was trade routes, not the projection of military power, that emblemized the “Pax Mongolica.”[”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“The European coast of the Mediterranean is old and rich; the North African coast is young and poor. The age of migration has only begun.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“We are a people who deny publicly that we are even partially in the Balkans, but we admit our Balkan identity privately, among ourselves.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“Because of the creation of a global middle class in the intervening decades, everyone the world over looks and acts increasingly similar. In this sense at least, travel has lost its magic; or, rather, I should say the traveler must now work harder to understand the mystery of places given that travel relies on the differences between us.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“With one change of buses I am in Split in under two and a half hours,”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“Bus travel is easy in Dalmatia. It is a decidedly middle-class affair over good roads and with dependable schedules”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“Yet, at the café tables in the morning, young mothers with designer sunglasses rock their babies in strollers with one hand and and sip morning coffee with the other. Normality is the most beautiful of all things, especially considering such a past.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“The history of the area is overwhelming: Hitler, Mussolini, Tito, and Milošević, for example.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“It is an old story: a frontier church hard up against the borders of Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam, feeling too insecure to shed its prejudices against—as it now happens—Jews and Muslims.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“used to take many long and uncomfortable hours in a bus, car, or train to journey between the deep interior of Croatia and the coast. But the building of several massive, graded, and multi-laned superhighways from Zagreb down the mountains to Rijeka, to Senj, to Zadar, and to Split along the Adriatic coast has cut the distance dramatically”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“you must seek to become more than what you are by exposing yourself to different lands,”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“timeless conversation in the era before smartphones.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“un conflicto inminente y que fue publicado en una serie de artículos en The Atlantic años antes de que la guerra estallara e incluso antes de la caída del Muro de Berlín, no satisfacía ni por asomo los estándares de objetividad e investigación de Malcolm.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriático: Claves geopolíticas del pasado y el futuro de Europa

“whereas the Catholic Church is unified under a pope, the Orthodox world is more an assemblage of “independent local Churches” that are “highly flexible” and”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“So many transformations!”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age

“many of the young people who are, in fact, progressive have been emigrating en masse for jobs and new lives abroad, leaving the reactionary ones behind.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age