people-from-the-netherlands

"Everyone brings their A game to the championships and I hope to do the same."

"Changing my stride pattern is one of the biggest changes I will make in my career. I like the challenge. I knew it would be tough but I really like the feel of the 14 strides compared to 15 so I think we made a really good decision."

"I’d been feeling great in training and that I could not only run 51 but do it in my last competition before Budapest is great. I have all the information I think we need in what we can do better – now it’s time to work hard and get the last things perfect."

"I had wanted this [51 seconds] and to race in this stadium (London) for so long so to do so well in this atmosphere…I couldn’t be happier...I’d been feeling great in training and that I could not only run 51 but do it in my last competition before Budapest is great. I have all the information I think we need in what we can do better – now it’s time to work hard and get the last things perfect."

"For children and young adults, animals help them learn to empathize. Horses, goats, sheep … kids have to be able to take care of these animals and learn to be responsible for them, which is a really important lesson. It's really good for kids to grow up with animals."

"I've done it, be of good cheer."

"Tromp goes forth today: he trumpets with all his strength, And call to the sea and plunge into your thoughts, A lust to do good, a zeal for the Land, His heart is dear and all his soul is burning, Thou, heed his business and heed his commandments; He will teach you to play with ice, according to art, And bounce with the steel; yes led to the dance, Not a woman and serve, but not as a swift man."

"Here rests the sea hero Tromp, the brave protector; Of seafaring and the sea; in the service of the free country, that keeps man's memory in the precious marble; So lively as he died before the Dutch beach. Sound with murderous cries and thunder of kartouen, Since Great Britain was on fire, all the water fell. He has carved himself in the hearts of the citizens That image endures the splendor of tomb and marble stone."

"Spaniards and Dutchmen, and Frenchmen and such men, As foemen did curse them, the bowmen of England! No other land could nurse them"

"I am thinking about something a Dutch historian once told me about the cultural revolution that swept over the Netherlands in the 1960s. It had been such a settled, orderly, bourgeois nation. The Second World War and the Nazi occupation shattered something deep in the Dutch. After the war, they tried to rebuild what they had, but it was a feeble replica. When the winds of the counterculture began to blow, the establishment institutions collapsed, as if the revolution were inevitable."

"German Bismarck said that the solution of the Irish question lay in having the Irish to swap countries with the Dutch. He added that the Dutch would make Ireland the most beautiful island in the world while the Irish would neglect to mend the dykes left to them by the Dutch and therefore would be drowned."

"Hollanders are not a nation to rob another of its property, but desire to live in friendship with all people, and trade with them."

"These people were of all races, colors, and creeds. French were in the north and in the Carolinas. Dutch had built the town on Manhattan island, and their patroons' estates in the Hudson valley; now they were building their own cabins in the Mohawk Indian country that is now New York State. Germans had settled in the Jerseys and in the far west, beyond Philadelphia. Germans and Scotch-Irish were climbing the Carolina mountains; Swedes were in Delaware, English and French and Dutch and Irish were settled in Massachusetts, the New Hampshire Grants, Connecticut, and Virginia. Mingled with all these were Italians, Portuguese, Finns, Arabs, Armenians, Russians, Greeks, and Africans from a dozen very different African peoples and cultures. Black, brown, yellow and white, all these peoples were some of them free and some of them slaves. Also they were intermarried with the American Indians."

"When things go sideways in this unhappy world, nobody cries out in the dead of night: “For the love of God, somebody call the Dutch!”"

"The Dutch are like the Hindus in their great tolerance."