Capitals

"Rome, Rome, thou art no more As thou hast been! On thy seven hills of yore Thou sat'st a queen."

"Rome was ruined more by neglect of agriculture, and giving no attention to useful trade and commerce, than by the invasion of barbarians."

"Veuve d'un peuple-roi, mais reine encore du monde."

"It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption. This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated. The natives of Europe were brave and robust. Spain, Gaul, Britain, and Illyricum, supplied the legions with excellent soldiers, and constituted the real strength of the monarchy. Their personal valour remained, but they no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honour, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign, and trusted for their defence to a mercenary army. The posterity of their boldest leaders was contented with the rank of citizens and subjects. The most aspiring spirits resorted to the court or standard of the emperors; and the deserted provinces, deprived of political strength or union, insensibly sunk into the languid indifference of private life."

"Yes, I have finally arrived to this Capital of the World! I now see all the dreams of my youth coming to life... Only in Rome is it possible to understand Rome."

"The traveler who has contemplated the ruins of ancient Rome may conceive some imperfect idea of the sentiments which they must have inspired when they reared their heads in the splendor of unsullied beauty."

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars."

"Leave for a while thy costly country seat; And, to be great indeed, forget The nauseous pleasures of the great: Make haste and come: Come, and forsake thy cloying store; Thy turret that surveys, from high, The smoke, and wealth, and noise of Rome; And all the busy pageantry That wise men scorn, and fools adore: Come, give thy soul a loose, and taste the pleasures of the poor."

"Quod tantis Romana manus contexuit annis Proditor unus iners angusto tempore vertit."

"Y á Roma por todo."

"Cuando á Roma fueres, haz como vieres."

"You cheer my heart, who build as if Rome would be eternal."

"When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; And when Rome falls—the World."

"O Rome! my country! city of the soul!"

"When they are at Rome, they do there as they see done."

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone - Greece with its immortal glories - is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation."

"While many of the world's richest people live in London, four of its boroughs rank among the twenty poorest in England, and 27 percent of the city's population live in poverty. London's polarized economic landscape is typical of "superstar" cities. Other leading cities of Europe—Oslo, Amsterdam, Athens, Budapest, Madrid, Prague, Riga, Stockholm, Tallinn, Vienna, Vilnius—also suffer widening gaps between the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy."

"A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art."

"Let there be light! Said Liberty, And like sunrise from the sea, Athens arose!"

"How they love freedom on this soil!"

"Athens, of a part of whose political life Thucydides tells the story, must ever be an object of the highest interest to every political student, because in what has come down to us of her history and of her literature, we have so complete and so minute a picture of all the features of her public life, not only historians and biographers, but the philosophers, the orators, the poets, have combined to analyse the springs of her actions and to reveal her to us as she really was. And there was that in the Athenian character that made such a revelation the easier; for with all their faults—and they were many—they were a people deserving the praise which Pericles bestowed on them when he said: "Our social march is free, not only in regard to public affairs, but also in regard to intolerance of each other's diversity of daily pursuits. For we are not angry with our neighbour for what he may do to please himself; nor do we ever put on those sour looks which, though they do no positive damage, are not the less sure to offend.""

"Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts and eloquence, native to famous wits."

"Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages pain,—wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,—there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens."

"If we consider merely the subtlety of disquisition, the force of imagination, the perfect energy and elegance of expression, which characterise the great works of Athenian genius, we must pronounce them intrinsically most valuable; but what shall we say when we reflect that from hence have sprung, directly or indirectly, all the noblest creations of the human intellect; that from hence were the vast accomplishments, and the brilliant fancy of Cicero; the withering fire of Juvenal; the plastic imagination of Dante; the humour of Cervantes; the comprehension of Bacon; the wit of Butler; the supreme and universal excellence of Shakspeare? All the triumphs of truth and genius over prejudice and power, in every country and in every age, have been the triumphs of Athens. Wherever a few great minds have made a stand against violence and fraud, in the cause of liberty and reason, there has been her spirit in the midst of them; inspiring, encouraging, consoling."

"To illustrate how dramatically populations can displace each other over time, the historian E.M. Kulischer once reminded his readers that in A.D. 900 Berlin had no Germans, Moscow had no Russians, Budapest had no Hungarians, Madrid was a Moorish settlement, and Constantinople had hardly any Turks. He added that the Normans had not yet settled in Great Britain and before the sixteenth century there were no Europeans living in North or South America, Australia, New Zealand, or South Africa."

"The odd thing about modern Europe is that, if you look at the borders, you might think that Germany had won the First World War... The European Union and the old Soviet states are associated with a Europe that feels as if it is run from Berlin. From Scandinavia to Turkey, lorries trundle back and forth with German industrial goods; the euro is mainly German, the Deutsche Bank dominates the eurozone."

"To my mind, imperialism is something very simple and clear and it exists as a fact when one country, a large country, seizes a certain strip of territory and subjects to its laws a certain number of men and women against their will. Soviet policy after the beginning of the second world war was precisely this. There is no difficulty in pointing this out, but the difficulty lies in the fact that when one quotes from memory one will forget one or other argument. Because the Russians, thanks to the second world war, have quite simply annexed the three Baltic States, taken a piece of Finland, a piece of Rumania, a piece of Poland, a piece of Germany and, thanks to a well thought-out policy composed of internal subversion and external pressure, have established Governments justifiably styled as Satellites, in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest, Tirana and East Berlin - I except Belgrade where the regime is unique thanks to the energy and courage of Marshal Tito. If all this does not constitute manifestations of imperialism, if all this is not the result of a policy consciously willed and consciously pursued, an imperialist aim, then indeed we shall have to start to go back to a new discussion and a new definition of words."

"Few areas of the national life of those Western European countries failed to benefit from the decades of parasitic exploitation of the colonies. One Nigerian, after visiting Brussels in 1960, wrote: “I saw for myself the massive palaces, museums and other public buildings paid for by Congo ivory and rubber.” In recent times, African writers and researchers have also been amazed to find the amount of looted African treasure stacked away in the ; and there are comparable if somewhat smaller collections of African art in Paris, Berlin, and New York. Those are some of the things which, in addition to monetary wealth, help to define the metropoles as developed and “civilized.”"

"So there is no single European people. There is no single all-embracing community of culture and tradition among, say, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Berlin and Belgrade. In fact, there are at least four communities: the Northern Protestant, the Latin Catholic, the Greek Orthodox, and the Muslim Ottoman. There is no single language - there are more than twenty. (...) There are no real European political parties (...). And most significantly of all: unlike the United States, Europe still does not have a common story."

"Cities like London, New York, Berlin, Paris, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Detroit, or Glasgow are high spots of slavery in comparison to Albania, Bulgaria, or even Central Africa. The slavery of the watch and clock, the bourgeois, anthropocentric slavery of material prestige and successful competition (to slave in order to keep up standards), the wage slavery of the proletarian, the school slavery of the children, the conscription slavery of the adolescents, the road slavery, the factory slavery, the barrack slavery, the party slavery, the office slavery, the parlor slavery of manners and conventions — all these slaveries make political "freedom" appear a bitter joke."

"That absurd trickle called the Spree, for instance, in Berlin, does not deserve the name of river."

"It was Berlin itself he was hungry to meet; the Berlin Wystan had promised him. To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys."

"Few at the time or since have questioned the costs or the risks associated with Berlin in 1948–1949. From that time until the end of the Cold War, the Allies’ presence in West Berlin remained the embodiment of Soviet frustration and, despite the city’s real vulnerability, of America’s commitment to halt aggression. Berlin became an important intelligence site for both sides—an opportunity to dig listening tunnels, recruit spies and counteragents, and monitor the other’s activities—but for the West it also provided an invaluable means to observe the communists’ military personnel, formations, and equipment. Moreover, less than four years after World War II, two million West Berliners—and, by extension, the entire population of western Germany—were suddenly transformed into America’s democratic protégés. Truman’s actions in 1948–1949 replaced appeasement with firmness and selective engagement with an expansive definition of US interests and prestige. The Berlin airlift also redefined America’s view of its Cold War partnerships to include populations unwilling or incapable of defending themselves from aggression, who would be rescued by decisive US action. In real as well as symbolic terms, the “Berlin syndrome” wiped out the Munich nightmare that had haunted the West for a decade."

"There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass' sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin."

"Einstein reached the pinnacle of his profession not in 1932, when he moved to Princeton, but in 1914, when he was appointed Professor at the University of Berlin, Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Even the finest scientists produced by Cambridge felt obliged to do a tour of duty in Germany. There was, however, another Germany - a Germany of provincial hometowns that felt no affection for the frenzied modernism of the Grossstadt. This Germany had been traumatized by the upheavals that had begun with the ghastly revelation of military defeat in November 1918. Nearly all the revolutionary events of the immediate post-war period took place in the big cities: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich. Despite the decision to draft the new republic's constitution in the sleepy capital of Thuringia, the Weimar Republic was always a metropolitan affair."

"To many visitors, Germany in the 1920s was the United States of Europe: big, industrial, ultra-modern. It was home to some of Europe's biggest and best corporations: the electrical engineering giant Siemens, the financial titan Deutsche Bank, the automobile maker Mercedes-Benz, the chemical conglomerate IG-Farben. Berlin boasted the biggest film industry in Europe, producing in Fritz Lang's Metropolis the science-fiction masterpiece of the twenties and in the same director's M the definitive film noir. Berlin had newspapers as sensational as William Randolph Hearst's (the 8Uhr-Abendblatt); department stores as big as Macy's (the Kaufhaus des Westens); sports stars as idolized as 'Babe' Ruth (the boxer Max Schmeling). So pervasive was the transatlantic influence that Franz Kafka felt able to write Amerika without even going there."

"Berlin has become the paradise of international homosexuals."

"Berlin stimulates like arsenic."

"And now we come to the most lurid Underworld of all cities — that of post-war Berlin. Ever since the declaration of peace, Berlin found its outlet in the wildest dissipation imaginable. The German is gross in his immorality, he likes his Halb-Welt or underworld pleasures to be devoid of any Kultur or refinement, he enjoys obscenity in a form which even the Parisian would not tolerate."

"I'm guided by a signal in the heavens I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin."

"Boston is among an increasing number of municipalities, universities, and private foundations that have announced plans to divest from fossil fuels. In late October, ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, better known as COP26, Auckland, New Zealand; Copenhagen, Denmark; Glasgow, Scotland; Paris; Rio de Janeiro; and Seattle announced commitments to divest from fossil fuel companies and increase investments to make cities more sustainable. Also last month, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott signed a bill that requires the city’s three pension funds to divest from the fossil fuel industry. Those are in addition to divestment commitments made last year by Berlin; Bristol, England; Cape Town, South Africa; Durban, South Africa; London; Los Angeles; Milan; New Orleans; New York City; Oslo; Norway; Pittsburgh; and Vancouver, Canada. “Cities are at the forefront of tackling the climate emergency and there is real momentum to move investments away from fossil fuels and toward climate solutions,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is chair-elect of C40 Cities, a network of mayors working to confront climate change, said in a statement. “I will continue to encourage more cities to join the movement, and urge national governments and private finance institutions to mobilize more finance to invest directly in cities to support a green and fair recovery.”"

"A disgusting city, this Berlin, a place where no one believes in anything."

"It is true to say that Berlin had far fewer memorials associated with colonialism than imperial cities such as London or Paris. Two memorial stones Two memorial stones and one obelisk were erected to the memory of those soldiers who died in the colonial wars in China and German South-West Africa. Although Imperial Germany saw a major debate about a larger memorial for all Germans who died for the fatherland in the colonies, no specific plans were realized before the outbreak of war in 1914. A central memorial to the memory of the German colonies was only erected in 1932, and then it was built in Bremen and not in Berlin. However, the capital of the imperial nation saw the creation of an “African quarter” in Berlin Wedding. In 1899 the first two streets were named Kameruner Strasse and Togostrasse. 21 other names followed, names of colonies, of particular places in colonies, of famous colonizers and colonial generals. The renaming of streets with a colonial theme continued into the 1920s, demonstrating the strength and the appeal of colonial demonstrating the strength and the appeal of colonial revisionism in the Weimar Republic."

"I see Berlin as the capital of the West; to me, it's a city where everyone can find a home, where everyone can find freedom, it's the last bastion against oppression."

"In their native countries, Roosevelt and Churchill are regarded as examples of wise statesmen. But we, during our jail conversations, were astonished by their constant shortsightedness and even stupidity. How could they, retreating gradually from 1941 to 1945, leave Eastern Europe without any guarantees of independence? How could they abandon the large territories of Saxony and Thuringia in return for such a ridiculous toy as the four-zoned Berlin that, moreover, was later to become their Achille’s heel? And what kind of military or political purpose did they see in giving away hundreds of thousands of armed Soviet citizens (who were unwilling to surrender, whatever the terms) for Stalin to have them killed? It is said that by doing this, that they secured the imminent participation of Stalin in the war against Japan. Already armed with the Atomic bomb, they did pay for Stalin so that he wouldn’t refuse to occupy Manchuria to help Mao Zedong to gain power in China and Kim Il Sung, to get half of Korea!… Oh, misery of political calculation! When later Mikolajczyk was expelled, when the end of Beneš and Masaryk came, Berlin was blocked, Budapest was in flames and turned silent, when ruins fumed in Korea and when the conservatives fled from Suez – didn’t really some of those who had a better memory, recall for instance the episode of giving away the Cossacks?"

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

"I note the obvious signs of renewal and hope everywhere in Berlin. From the construction of modern new buildings like those in the Potsdameplatz, to the restoration of the splendid old buildings along the Unter Den Linden and elsewhere in the city. The museums, opera houses, concert halls and the theatres of Berlin distinguish the City as a cultural metropolis. The Reichstag (Parliament) building with its distinctive new glass dome truly represents the aspirations of the German people. It has been hardly two years that the capital moved from Bonn to Berlin but already Berlin appears very comfortable in its role as the capital. In the space of less than two years, Berlin has also won the acceptance not merely of the German people but of the whole world as the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany. I wish to congratulate the people and the Government of Germany in the successful transformation of Berlin."

"Poor but sexy"

"An attempt is being made by the Russians in Berlin to build up a quasi-Communist party in their zone of Occupied Germany by showing special favors to groups of left-wing German leaders. At the end of the fighting last June, the American and British Armies withdrew westwards, in accordance with an earlier agreement, to a depth at some points of 150 miles upon a front of nearly four hundred miles, in order to allow our Russian allies to occupy this vast expanse of territory which the Western Democracies had conquered. If now the Soviet Government tries, by separate action, to build up a pro-Communist Germany in their areas, this will cause new serious difficulties in the British and American zones, and will give the defeated Germans the power of putting themselves up to auction between the Soviets and the Western Democracies. Whatever conclusions may be drawn from these facts - and facts they are - this is certainly not the Liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace."

"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow."