"Any attempts to alter the status of parts of Ukrainian territory are a clear violation of international law, the UN Charter and Ukraine’s Constitution, they further undermine sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, and will not be recognised by the European Union. Russia, its political leadership, and all those involved in violations of international law and international humanitarian law will be held accountable for these illegal actions. The European Union remains unwavering in its support for Ukraine's independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, and urges the Russian Federation to immediately and unconditionally withdraw all of its troops and military equipment from the entire territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders."

"The paradox is that 500 million Europeans are asking 300 million Americans to defend them against 140 million Russians. We must rely on ourselves, fully aware of our potential and with confidence that we are a global power."

"Europe has entered a world of power, yet we are still playing chess in a boxing match. 'Business as usual' is a recipe for another three years of humiliation. Europe has to stop thinking as a market and start acting as a power."

"Our Union is more than an association of states. It is a new legal order, which is not based on the balance of power between nations but on the free consent of states to share sovereignty. From pooling coal and steel, to abolishing internal borders, from six countries to soon twenty-eight with Croatia joining the family this has been a remarkable European journey which is leading us to an “ever closer Union”. And today one of the most visible symbols of our unity is in everyone’s hands. It is the Euro, the currency of our European Union. We will stand by it."

"We do not fear that the operations of time may never bring a united Europe, with a reunited Germany at its centre. We do not know how it will happen, how this unnaturally divided Germany is to become once again. It is obscure to us, and we must take refuge in the belief that history will find ways and means of overcoming the unnatural and restoring the natural: a Germany as a consciously serving member of a Europe united in self-awareness – not as its lord and master... Let us not delude ourselves over the fact that among the difficulties delaying the unification of Europe is a mistrust of the purity of German intentions, a fear by other peoples of Germany and of hegemonic plans that its vital energy may install into it, which in their view it does not conceal very well….It is for the rising German generation, for German youth, to dispel the mistrust, this fear, by rejecting what has long been rejected and clearly and unanimously announcing their desire: not for a German Europe, but for a European Germany.""

"The future treaty which you are discussing has no chance of being agreed; if it was agreed, it would have no chance of being ratified; and if it were ratified, it would have no chance of being applied. And if it was applied, it would be totally unacceptable to Britain."

"There are only two kinds of states in Europe: small states, and small states that have not yet realised they are small."

"A referendum on this matter consists of consulting people who don’t know the problems instead of consulting people who know them. I would deplore a situation in which the policy of this great country [the UK] should be left to housewives. It should be decided instead by trained and informed people."

"You know what they say about the average Common Market official? He has the organizing ability of the Italians, the flexibility of the Germans and the modesty of the French. And that’s topped up by the imagination of the Belgians, the generosity of the Dutch and the intelligence of the Irish."

"Here in Western Europe you have created a multinational democratic community in which there is a free flow of people, of information, of goods, and of culture. West Europeans move frequently and freely in all directions, sharing and partaking of each other's ideas and culture. It is my hope that in the 21st century, which is only 15 years away, all Europeans, from Moscow to Lisbon, will be able to travel without a passport; and the free flow of people and ideas will include the other half of Europe. It is my fervent wish that in the next century there will be one free Europe."

"The President of the Commission, M. Delors, said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European Parliament to be the democratic body of the Community, he wanted the Commission to be the Executive and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the Senate. No. No. No."

"The European Union implies the notion of the ‘Minimal State’, the abandonment of mixed economy and of economic planning, the redefinition of the ways the expenses are arranged, a redistribution of responsibilities that reduces the power of parliamentary assemblies and increases that of governments, fiscal autonomy for local authorities, the rejection of the principle of widespread gratuitousness of services (and the ensuing reform of healthcare and of social security), the abolition of the wage indexation scale, the dramatic reduction of pockets of privilege, the mobility of the factors of production, the reduction of the State’s presence in the credit system and in industry, the abandonment of inflationary behaviour not only by workers, but also by the producers of services, the abolition of the norms that fixed administered prices and tariffs. In a word: a new pact between States and citizens, to the latter’s advantage."

"Europe began as an elitist project in which it was believed that all was required was to convince the decision-makers. That phase of benign despotism is over."

"If you cannot join them, beat them!""

"Europe was built in a St. Simonian [i.e., technocratic] way from the beginning, this was Monnet’s approach: The people weren’t ready to agree to integration, so you had to get on without telling them too much about what was happening. Now St. Simonianism is finished. It can’t work when you have to face democratic opinion."

"The two ideologies, of Communism and of Europe, have much more in common than they Euroenthusiasts] like to admit ... One had its apparatchiks, the other its Eurocrats ... Their respective credos come together [in many respects including their belief in] the inevitable withering-away of the nation-state ... Initiates in the secrets of History, the two schools are equally convinced that they know where History is leading – towards the Promised Land. For the first, its name is the classless society, for the second, it is Europe without borders."

"Although 50 years of European peace since the end of World War II may augur well for the future, it must be remembered that there were also more than 50 year of peace between the Congress of Vienna and the Franco-Prussian War. Moreover, contrary to the hopes and assumptions of Jean Monnet and other advocates of European integration, the devastating American Civil War shows that a formal political union is no guarantee against an intra-European war."

"The big question today is 'Will globalisation allow democracy to survive?' On one side we have the multinationals, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. I want to help to redress the balance on the other side."

"There is more than a whiff of Oxford “high-table history” in this combination of quaint notions. It recalls the mid-1950s assessments of European integration by British elites, who viewed European unity as either a French geopolitical gambit or an idealist aberration."

"What we should grasp, however, from the lessons of European history is that, first, there is nothing necessarily benevolent about programmes of European integration; second, the desire to achieve grand utopian plans often poses a grave threat to freedom; and third, European unity has been tried before, and the outcome was far from happy."

"It is, in fact, a classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a programme whose inevitable destiny is failure: only the scale of the final damage done is in doubt."

"In practice, as those running businesses had already been discovering for some months, the most obvious consequence of the Single Market was a huge increase in regulation. Far from being a "free trade area", the new Single Market was now the most highly-regulated economic zone in the world, to set up which had required the issuing of 1,368 EC directives."

"What was now becoming uncomfortably clear was that, whatever the Community claimed it was trying to do, the result was invariably the opposite. A Single Market claimed to be a great act of "liberation" and "deregulation" had produced one of the greatest concentrations of constrictive regulation in history... At least on balance, it might be argued that Single Market must have achieved its intended purpose of stimulating economic growth and creating jobs. But even that was a mirage. In the three years preceding the launch, average EU growth had been an unimpressive 2.3 per annum, while average unemployment had been 8.5 percent. In the four years after January 1993, the growth rate was to slump to 1.67 percent – the poorest performance of any economic bloc in the developed world – while EU unemployment would soar to 10.9 percent, with nearly 20 million people out of work."

"In Europe, there exist no borders. The people I spoke to all agreed that their quality of life was enhanced in many ways after unification of the continent. We saw the amazing synergy effects of European union."

"In May 1949, the Council of Europe was established in Strasbourg, a body then devoid of effective political powers and charged only with «laying the foundations for the construction of a European federation». Thus in the act of its foundation. The following year - therefore, in C.E.1950 - that Council announced a competition of ideas, open to all artists, for a flag of the future united Europe. A then young Alsatian designer, Arsène Heitz, participated with a sketch, where twelve white stars stood out in a circle on a blue background. As he later revealed, the idea was not accidental: devoted to the Madonna, he recited the rosary every day. Just when he heard about the European competition and decided to participate, he was reading the story of Saint Catherine Labouré and – stimulated by that reading – he had decided to procure, for himself and his wife, a «Miraculous Medal», which he had not known about until then. The stars, therefore, of his plan came from there: and, there, they came directly from the Apocalypse and from the "Woman clothed with the sun" with the crown around her head. As for blue, it was the traditional color of the Virgin. Among the 101 sketches that arrived from all over the world, "inexplicably", as Heitz himself said (who had participated in the competition without too much hope, almost only to respond to an impulse given to him by the discovery of the Medal), the Council of Europe chose his. It should be noted, among other things, that the head of the commission that made the choice was a Jew, Paul M.G.Lévy, director of the Council's Press and Information Service. Therefore, no confessional motivations were at work [...] Furthermore, to confirm the singularity of the choice, Heitz's proposal was opposed by the fact that, if there were 12 stars on the proposed flag, not as many were then the States of the Council. In fact, in the face of criticism, the designer had to reply that the twelve represented a "symbol of fullness" (and this is, in fact, also in the Old Testament: twelve, among other things, the sons of Jacob , like the 12 tribes of Israel; and therefore twelve is the number wanted by Jesus for his apostles, meaning that the Church is the "new chosen people"). Having adopted this symbolic perspective, the community authorities, when Europe's member states ended up exceeding a dozen, officially established that the number of stars on the flag was to be considered immutable."

"Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of a figure like De Gaulle, but of Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions, and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the 1970s, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s, and the arrival in power in the 1990s of a postwar generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone."

"We are a very special construction unique in the history of mankind … Sometimes I like to compare the EU as a creation to the organisation of empire. We have the dimension of empire .. What we have is the first non-imperial empire .. We have 27 countries that fully decided to work together and to pool their sovereignty. I believe it is a great construction and we should be proud of it."

"… the European Union functions as a 27-member caucus (plus several associated members) and they have to agree on a statement before they can even say “good morning”."

"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."

"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."

"Da più parti si ricava un'impressione generale di stanchezza e d'invecchiamento, di un'Europa nonna e non più fertile e vivace. Per cui i grandi ideali che hanno ispirato l'Europa sembrano aver perso forza attrattiva, in favore dei tecnicismi burocratici delle sue istituzioni. (From many quarters there is a general impression of fatigue and aging, of a “grandma” Europe that is not fertile and lively. So the great ideals that inspired Europe seem to have lost its attractive force in favour of the bureaucratic technicalities of its institutions.)"

"Europe is not old, haggard or barren. Europe is young, dynamic and vital. Our continent remains the best place in the world to live."

"No continent is as small and fragmented as Europe. Only Australia is smaller, yet Europe consists of fifty independent nations (including Turkey and the Caucasus, for reasons explained later). Crowded with nations, it is also crowded with people. Europe's population density is 72.5 people per square kilometer. The European Union's density is 112 people per square kilometer. Asia has 86 people per square kilometer. Europe is crowded and fragmented."

"Much of the left campaigned against entering the when Margaret Thatcher and the like campaigned for membership. It would threaten the ability of leftwing governments to implement policies, people like my parents thought, and would forbid the sort of industrial activism needed to protect domestic industries. But then happened, and an increasingly battered and demoralised left began to believe that the only hope of progressive legislation was via Brussels. The misery of the left was, in the 1980s, matched by the triumphalism of the free marketeers, who had transformed Britain beyond many of their wildest ambitions, and began to balk at the restraints put on their dreams by the European project."

"The left's pessimism about the possibility of implementing social reform at home without the help of the EU fused with a progressive vision of internationalism and unity, one that had emerged from the rubble of fascism and genocidal war. It is perhaps this feelgood halo that has been extinguished by a country the EU has driven into an economic collapse unseen since America’s great depression. It was German and French banks who recklessly lent to Greece that have benefited from bailouts, not the Greek economy. The destruction of Greece’s national sovereignty was achieved by economic strangulation, [...] this was all about crushing a rebellion."

"Let’s just be honest about our fears. We fear that we will inadvertently line up with the xenophobes and the immigrant-bashing nationalists, and a "no" result will be seen as their vindication, unleashing a carnival of Ukippery. Hostility to the EU is seen as the preserve of the hard right, and not the sort of thing progressives should entertain. And that is why – if indeed much of the left decides on Lexit – it must run its own separate campaign and try and win ownership of the issue."