“It was not "ironic" that the most liberal country in western Europe should be so eager to descend into a revoltingly illiberal servitude. It was entirely foreseeable. Justifying extraordinary levels of mass immigration first as narrowly defined economic self-interest and then as moral vanity, Europe made its principal source of new Europeans a population whose primal identity derived from a belief system that claimed total jurisdiction over every aspect of their lives. They were then amazed to discover that that same population of new "Europeans" assumed that all European social, cultural, and political life should realign itself with that belief system. Perhaps they should have considered that possibility earlier...the European establishment unwittingly eased the transition from "multicultural tolerance" to the more explicitly unicultural and intolerant regimes that followed.”

“Europe, it is true, is a geographical and, within certain limits, an historical cultural conception. But the idea of Europe as an economic unit contradicts capitalist development in two ways. First of all there exist within Europe among the capitalist States – and will so long as these exist – the most violent struggles of competition and antagonisms, and secondly the European States can no longer get along economically without the non-European countries. ... At the present stage of development of the world market and of world economy, the conception of Europe as an isolated economic unit is a sterile concoction of the brain. ...And if the idea of a European union in the economic sense has long been outstripped, this is no less the case in the political sense.....Only were one suddenly to lose sight of all these happenings and manoeuvres, and to transfer oneself back to the blissful times of the European concert of powers, could one say, for instance, that for forty years we have had uninterrupted peace. This conception, which considers only events on the European continent, does not notice that the very reason why we have had no war in Europe for decades is the fact that international antagonisms have grown infinitely beyond the narrow confines of the European continent, and that European problems and interests are now fought out on the world seas and in the by-corners of Europe.”

“The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European poeples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable.”

“Neoclassical economics is precisely the theory one would expect a vastly complex system of international corporations, world markets, and interconnected currencies to create to sustain, justify, explain, and predict "itself." And classical economics, correspondingly, was a predictable expression of an earlier European capitalism.”

“Because European countries now resolve differences through negotiation and consensus, there's sometimes an assumption that the entire world functions in the same way. But let us never forget ... beyond Europe's borders, in a world where oppression and violence are very real, liberation is still a moral goal, and freedom and security still need defenders.”

“The rat population thrived in such a horrible mess. Ironically, cats were believed to be the consorts of witches in those days, so they were killed. Persecution of cats during the Middle Ages nearly eliminated populations of the rat's natural predator, just when Europeans could have used the cats' hunting skills the most.”