“This book is not a scholarly volume, it is not a piece of investigative journalism, and most emphatically it is not a work of theory. It is a selection of commentaries and conversations in the long tradition of Balkan socialist propaganda. (p.14)”

“The Balkans I know is the Balkans from below: a space of bogoumils- these medieval heretics who fought against the Crusades and churches- and a place of anti-Ottoman resistance; a home to hajduks and klephts, pirates and rebels; a refuge of feminists and socialists, of antifascist and partisans; a place of dreamers of all sorts struggling both against provincial "peninsularity" as well as against occupations, foreign interventions and that process which is now, in a strange inversion of history, often described with that fashionable phrase, "balkanization." (p.11)”

“Imperial and colonial attitudes still define the terms 'civilized world,' 'international community' and 'civil society.' Balkan people were never too impressed by civilization. As early as 1871, the founder of the Balkan socialist movement, Svetozar Marković, ridiculed the entire 'civilized world,' from Times to the obedient Serbian press. The civilized world, he wrote, 'was composed of rich Englishmen, Brussels ministers and their deputies (the representatives of the capitalists), the European rulers and their marshals, generals, and other magnates, Viennese bankers and Belegrade journalists'...[he] believed...in a pluricultural Balkan Federation organized as a decentralized, directly demotractic society based on local agricultural and industrial associations. This is the kind of antinomian imagination that needs to be rediscovered: a horizontalist tradition of the barbarians who never accepted the civilized world that is now collapsing. (p.44)”

“The construct of a new, fictional 'Balkans' [is] a result of linguistic violence beginning with the verb 'to balkanize,' which most of the world's dictionaries define primarily as 'to divide.' Linguistic terrorism is only one part of the larger process of stigmatization that aims to establish social control and the imposition of silence upon the Balkan peoples so as to allow others to speak in their name. Thus, everyone can speak about the Balkans but the Balkanites themselves.”

“I feel absolutely no loyalty to Serbian, Croatian, or Bosnian national causes. I have no other emotion but utter contempt for people who helped destroy Yugoslavia, and I feel the same about the people who are now selling what is left of it." (p. 13)”

“I became an anarchist very early on. Anarchism, in my mind, meant taking democracy seriously and organizing prefiguratively- that is, in a way that anticipates that the society we are about to create. Instead of taking the power of the state, anarchism is concerned with socializing power- with creating new political and social structures not after the revolution, but in the immediate present, in the shell of the existing order. The basic goal, however, remains the same. Like my grandparents, I too believe in and dream of a region where many worlds fit, and where everything is for everyone. (p.12)”

“-Puedo darte todo lo que desees -dijo el hada-. Riqueza, poder y cetro, fama, una vida larga y feliz. Elige.-No quiero riqueza ni fama, poder ni cetros -respondió la bruja-. Quiero un caballo que sea negro y tan imposible de alcanzar como el viento de la noche. Quiero una espada que sea luminosa y afilada como los rayos de la luna. Quiero atravesar el mundo en la oscura noche con mi caballo negro, quiero quebrar las fuerzas del Mal y de la Oscuridad con mi espada de luz. Eso es lo que quiero.-Te daré un caballo que sea más negro que la noche y más ligero que el viento de la noche -le prometió el hada-. Te daré una espada que será más luminosa y afilada que los rayos de la luna. Pero no es poco lo que pides, bruja, habrás de pagármelo muy caro.-¿Con qué? En verdad nada tengo.-Con tu sangre.”