Denmark

"Denmark’s investment in U.S. Treasury bonds, like Denmark itself, is irrelevant."

"We are not Denmark. I love Denmark. We are the United States of America, and it is our job to rein in the excesses of capitalism."

"Well, what if I'm wrong, I mean — anybody could be wrong. We could all be wrong about the and the pink unicorn and the flying teapot. You happen to have been brought up, I would presume, in a Christian faith. You know what it's like to not believe in a particular faith because you're not a Muslim. You're not a Hindu. Why aren't you a Hindu? Because you happen to have been brought up in America, not in India. If you had been brought up in India, you'd be a Hindu. If you had been brought up in Denmark in the time of the Vikings, you'd be believing in Wotan and Thor. If you were brought up in classical Greece, you'd be believing in Zeus. If you were brought up in central Africa, you'd be believing in the great up the mountain. There's no particular reason to pick on the Judeo-Christian god, in which by the sheerest accident you happen to have been brought up and ask me the question, "What if I'm wrong?" What if you're wrong about the great Juju at the bottom of the sea?"

"European centrists are deeply confused about immigration. Many, especially on the centre-left, want to have both open borders and welfare states. But the evidence suggests that it is hard to be Denmark with a multicultural society. The lack of social solidarity makes high levels of taxation and redistribution unsustainable."

"The fact that Danish business leaders are warning of damage to the nation's brand, it is, however, strangely welcome. Seeming much more unfriendly and closed than other countries is the only path open to desperate politicians facing exploding costs and seemingly insurmountable integration issues. And darker measures may still lie ahead."

"The Northmen are often said to have burst out of their coastal settlements in what is now Sweden, Norway, and Denmark at the end of the eighth century. The most famous account of their arrival into the Christian realms of the west comes from Britain. In 793 warriors appeared off the coast of Northumbria, leaped from their ships, and robbed the island of Lindisfarne, desecrating the monastery and murdering its brothers. This ferocious raid sent shock waves rippling out from Britain. When the news reached Charlemagne’s court in Aachen, Alcuin of York wrote to the king of Northumbria, deploring the fact that “the church of St Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests of God, stripped of all its furnishing, exposed to the plundering of pagans.” He suggested to the king that he and his noblemen might mend their ways, starting by adopting more Christian haircuts and clothing styles. But it was too late for any of that. The Northmen had announced themselves as a major power in the western world. The next year, 794, raiders appeared on the other side of the British Isles, in the Hebrides. In 799 Vikings raided the monastery of Saint-Philibert at Noirmoutier, just to the south of the river Loire. Sixty years later Viking raids would be a painful feature of life not only in the North and Irish Seas but as far away as Lisbon, Seville, and north Africa, as Northmen tangled with Anglo-Saxons, Irish, Umayyads, and Franks. In 860 a band of Viking-descended warriors from what is now northwest Russia even sailed to Constantinople via the river Dnieper and the Black Sea, and laid the city under siege. Although exposed only to a tiny part of this, the chronicler of Noirmoutier wrote what could have been an epigram for the entire age: “The number of ships grows, the endless stream of Vikings never ceases to increase . . . the Vikings conquer everything in their path and nothing resists them.”"

"Americans reflexively believe that 'Had Germany occupied the United States, nearly all of us would have joined an armed resistance to the Nazis. That's what I thought, too, when I was 16. But that reflects a hopelessly naive view, both of what the world looked like to most people after the Nazis had conquered Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway and France, and of what it actually meant to take up arms against an occupying power'."

"The European Union and many of its countries, which used to take initiatives in the United Nations for peaceful settlements of conflict, are now one of the most important war assets of the U.S./NATO front. Many countries have also been drawn into complicity in breaking international law through U.S./U.K./NATO wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and so on."

"I know that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism... Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy... The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish."

"When you look around the world, you see every other major country providing health care to all people as a right, except the United States. You see every other major country saying to moms that, when you have a baby, we’re not gonna separate you from your newborn baby, because we are going to have — we are gonna have medical and family paid leave, like every other country on Earth. Those are some of the principles that I believe in, and I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway, and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people."

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."

"As for Marjah, its mention at all in the same breath as the American Revolution or the Civil War is truly grotesque. The little farming communities that PR machine lyingly described as a small city swarming with Taliban fighters was nothing but a staged and carefully managed battle set, designed to make Americans forget that the US was (and is) bogged down in an unwinnable war of conquest and occupation in Afghanistan. The few American soldiers and Marines who died there died for the sake of White Hours and Pentagon propaganda, not for the sake of defending Americans’ vaunted freedoms. The set has now been torn down, the klieg lights have been turned off, and “Marjah” has reverted to Taliban territory again."

"A shared pictorial and technical tradition stretched from India to Thrace, where the cauldron was made, and thence to Denmark. Yogic rituals, for example, can be inferred from the poses of an antler-bearing man on the cauldron and of an ox-headed figure on a seal impress from the Indian city of Mohenjo-Daro…Three other Indian links: ritual baths of goddesses with elephants (the Indian goddess is Lakṣmī); wheel gods (the Indian is Viṣṇu); the goddesses with braided hair and paired birds (the Indian is Hariti)."

"For Greenland is a barren place, A land where grows no green, But ice and snow, and the whale-fish blow, And the daylight’s seldom seen, brave boys! And the daylight’s seldom seen!"

"As Men in Greenland left beheld the sun From their horizon run; And thought upon the sad half-year Of cold and darkness they must suffer there:So on my parting mistress did I look."

"The Icelander Biœrn of Skardsa...relates that Jon Grœnlander, a Hamburgh seaman, was thrice driven among the Greenland islands, where he saw fishers' huts like those of Iceland, but could discern no people in the neighbourhood. Fragments of shattered boats, according to the same authority, have frequently been stranded on the coast of Iceland; and in 1625, an entire canoe was driven on shore, compacted of sinews and wooden pegs, and smeared over with blubber. An oar has since been found, inscribed in Runic characters, with the words, Oft var ek dasa, dur ek dro thik: "Oft was I tired, while I drew thee.""

"In my first voyage not experienced of the nature of those climates, and having no direction either by Chart, Globe, or other certaine relation in what altitude that passage was to be searched, I shaped a Northerly course and so sought the same toward the South, and in that my Northerly course I fell upon the shore which in ancient time was called Groenland, [...] the land being very high and full of mightie mountaines all covered with snow, no viewe of wood, grass or earth to be seene, and the shore two leagues off into the sea so full of yce that no shipping could by any meanes come neere the same. The lothsome view of the shore, and irksome noyse of the yce was such, as that it bred strange conceites among us, so that we supposed the place to be wast and voyd of any sensible or vegitable creatures, whereupon I called the same Desolation."

"Nunarput utoqqarsuanngoravit Niaqqut ulissimavoq qiinik. Qitornatit kissumiaannarpatit Tunillugit sineriavit piinik.Akullequtaasutut merlertutut Ilinni perortugut tamaani Kalaallinik imminik taajumavugut Niaqquit ataqqinartup saani."

"A stunted, stern, uncouth, amphibious stock Hewn from the living marble of the rock Or sprung from mermaids, and in ocean's bed With orcs and seals in sunless caverns bred, They might have held, from unrecorded time Sole patrimony in that hideous clime, So lithe their limbs, so fenced their frames to bear The intensest rigours of the polar air; Nimble and muscular and keen to run The rein-deer down a circuit of the sun; To climb the slippery cliffs, explore their cells, And storm and sack the sea-birds citadels; In bands, through snows, the mother-bear to trace Slay with their darts the cubs in her embrace, And while she licked their bleeding wounds to brave Her deadliest vengeance in her inmost cave. Train'd with inimitable skill to float Each, balanced, in his bubble of a boat, With dexterous paddle, steering through the spray, With poised harpoon to strike his lunging prey As though the skiff, the seaman, car and dart Were one compacted body, by one heart With instinct, motion, pulse, empower'd to ride A human Nautilus upon the tide; Or with a fleet of Kayaks to assail The desperation of the stranded whale, When wedg'd twixt jagged rocks he writhes and rolls In agony among the ebbing shoals, Washing the waves to foam, until the flood From wounds like geysers seems a bath of blood, Echo all night dumb pealing to his roar Till morn beholds him slain along the shore."

"“How do you find America?” a reporter asked Ringo Starr just over 61 years ago. The Beatles’ drummer replied: “Turn left at Green­land.”"

"If anyone thinks that the US Congress would have stood for any sort of troops moved to Greenland, I believe we’d have veto-proof majorities within two weeks."