Homelands Quotes

“Yet we might not be facing a climate emergency today if we had done what the Greens suggested nearly forty years ago. When in 2016 a conservative nationalist Polish foreign minister denounced a world of 'cyclists and vegetarians, who only want renewable energy' it was probably a 68er German schoolteacher he had in mind.”
― Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

“In Europe, zero is a recurring number.”
― Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

“Konrad Adenauer: ‘History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.”
― Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

“Our identities are given but also made. We can’t choose our parents, but we can choose who we become. ‘Basically I’m Chinese,’ Franz Kafka wrote in a postcard to his fiancée. If I say ‘basically I’m a central European’ I’m not literally claiming descent from the central European Yiddish writer Asch, but declaring an elective affinity.”
― Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe