Serbia Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Serbia. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Can you cite one speck of hard evidence of the benefits of "diversity" that we have heard gushed about for years? Evidence of its harm can be seen — written in blood — from Iraq to India, from Serbia to Sudan, from Fiji to the Philippines. It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.
Thomas Sowell
If the counsel of the peaceniks had been followed, Kuwait would today be the nineteenth province of Iraq. Bosnia would be a trampled and cleansed province of Greater Serbia, Kosovo would have been emptied of most of its inhabitants, and the Taliban would still be in power in Afghanistan. Yet nothing seems to disturb the contented air of moral superiority of those that intone the "peace movement".
Christopher Hitchens (The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens)
Hungary to the upper left, upper left, Serbia to the lower left, lower left. Bosnia on the bottom, on the bottom. Slovenia to the top, to the top. And where’s Croatia?” “Where? Where?” Jacob sung. “It’s next to the Adriatic Sea, across from Italy!
J. Lynn (Wait for You (Wait for You, #1))
In every country, those who were against war had been overruled. The Austrians had attacked Serbia when they might have held back; the Russians had mobilized instead of negotiating; the Germans had refused to attend an international conference to settle the issue; the French had been offered the chance to remain neutral and had spurned it; and now the British were about to join in when they might easily have remained on the sidelines.
Ken Follett (Fall of Giants (The Century Trilogy, #1))
There’s always a motive, Father. Ever since the war between the Balkan League of Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria against Turkey, we’ve heard nothing but reports of infighting within the league for the spoils of Turkish territories. Look at Hungary and Austria, who invested heavily in Serbia and then insisted that an independent Albanian
Jana Petken (The Guardian of Secrets)
When these people, my mother and people like her, came out here it was like leaving a reality; leaving a planet; turning your back. I guess we don’t appreciate it was such a big deal that they may never come back, never see their family again. – John Savić
Peter Brune (Suffering, Redemption and Triumph: The first wave of post-war Australian immigrants 1945-66)
Europeans the Poles or Balts coming in here … we brought here knowledge with us and our culture with us, but we assimilated … assimilated is not one way, it’s a two-way street. - Fred Ritzkowski, German
Peter Brune (Suffering, Redemption and Triumph: The first wave of post-war Australian immigrants 1945-66)
The Nature of Political Terrorism The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not “attack America,” as political leaders and news media in the United States have tried to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy. Employing the strategy of the weak, they killed innocent bystanders, whose innocence is, of course, no different from that of the civilians killed by American bombs in Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Chalmers Johnson (Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (American Empire Project))
I like it! I liked it when man to man no matter whether he is boss or he is ordinary worker, but in meantime they go to the pub, they drink beer together and call by first name. I like that. After few years, I think that Queensland is the best place in Australia … I am Queenslander! – Alex Sucharsky, Ukranian
Peter Brune (Suffering, Redemption and Triumph: The first wave of post-war Australian immigrants 1945-66)
The Soviet Union came apart along ethnic lines. The most important factor in this breakup was the disinclination of Slavic Ukraine to continue under a regime dominated by Slavic Russia. Yugoslavia came apart also, beginning with a brutal clash between Serbia and Croatia, here again 'nations' with only the smallest differences in genealogy; with, indeed, practically a common language. Ethnic conflict does not require great differences; small will do.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics)
Cruelty is absolutely foreign to their natures.Some people once talked of setting up a branch of the " Prevention of Cruelty to Animals" in Serbia, and were asked in astonishment what work they supposed they would find to do ; who ever heard of a Serbian being cruel to child or animal?
Flora Sandes (An English Woman-Sergeant in the Serbian Army)
When I touch you, it makes me trembling. I feel like I've lost myself, existentially. Your lips on mine makes me feel like I'm flying across the universe, without aimlessly.
Tamara Stamenkovic
deepening integration of Serbia into France’s web of alliances after 1905, which was rooted in both financial and geopolitical imperatives.
Christopher Clark (The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914)
Maize had an equivalent impact on much of the rest of the world after Columbus introduced it to Europe. Central Europeans became especially hooked on it; by the nineteenth century, maize was the daily bread of Serbia, Rumania, and Moldavia. So
Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
Good stories are never about a string of successes but about spectacular defeats,” Støp had said. “Even though Roald Amundsen won the race to the South Pole, it’s Robert Scott the world outside Norway remembers. None of Napoleon’s victories is remembered like the defeat at Waterloo. Serbia’s national pride is based on the battle against the Turks at Kosovo Polje in 1389, a battle the Serbs lost resoundingly. And look at Jesus! The symbol of the man who is claimed to have triumphed over death ought to be a man standing outside the tomb with his hands in the air. Instead, throughout time Christians have preferred the spectacular defeat: when he was hanging on the cross and close to giving up. Because it’s always the story of the defeat that moves us most.
Jo Nesbø (The Snowman (Harry Hole, #7))
For as long as anyone can remember, the history of Kosovo has been a battlefield pitting Serbs against Albanians. Each believes different things because each has been taught different things, and as they reach further back into time it becomes easier to argue whatever they want in order to find support for their view of the present.
Tim Judah (Kosovo: What Everyone Needs to Know)
It’s funny – you Irish are so like the Serbs.
Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)
Europe, he says, is frightened that an influx of foreigners will erode European values. But what values will there to be uphold if we abandon our duty to protect those less fortunate than ourselves? Wat incentive do we give to refugees to maintain the fabric of our society if that fabric is so ragged in the first place? "If Europe is not able to show a better way of life to them, then they will think that their morality is better than ours." "They need to face some higher standards of morality, " he says. "If not, they will set their own." [Quoting Serbian priest Tibor Varga]
Patrick Kingsley (The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe's Refugee Crisis)
You can walk around this culture now, as a proud supporter of the so called anti-war movement and it's made up of a lot of people I used to know … I'd like for them to be asked more often than they are, if your advice had been taken over the last 15 or so years; Slobodan Milosevic would still be the dictator of not just Serbia but also of a cleansed and ruined Bosnia and Kosovo. Saddam Hussein would still be the owner of Kuwait as well as Iraq, he would of nearly have doubled his holding of the worlds oil. The Taliban would still be in charge of Afghanistan. Don't you feel a little reproach to your so called high principle anti-war policy? Would that really have led to less violence, less cruelty?
Christopher Hitchens
NATO bombing of Serbia was undertaken by the ‘international community,’ according to consistent Western rhetoric—although those who did not have their heads buried in the sand knew that it was opposed by most of the world, often quite vocally. Those who do not support the actions of wealth and power are not part of ‘the global community.
Noam Chomsky (9-11)
....in Bosnia, mass rape was a policy of the war, systematically carried out, implicating neighbors, paramilitaries, soldiers.
Ausma Zehanat Khan (The Unquiet Dead (Rachel Getty & Esa Khattak #1))
Germany’s siege mentality and gnawing sense of encirclement (the need to ‘storm out of the fortress’ to prevent a Russian attack); Austria-Hungary’s hatred of Serbia; Russia’s deep fear of Germany; France’s vengeful chauvinism; and Britain’s ferocious Germanophobia.
Paul Ham (1913: The Eve of War)
Playing pool with Korean officials one evening in the Koryo Hotel, which has become the nightspot for foreign businessmen and an increasing number of diplomats (to say nothing of the burgeoning number of spies and journalists traveling under second identities), I was handed that day's edition of the Pyongyang Times. At first glance it seemed too laughable for words: endless pictures of the 'Dear Leader'—Little Boy's exalted title—as he was garlanded by adoring schoolchildren and heroic tractor drivers. Yet even in these turgid pages there were nuggets: a telegram congratulating the winner of the Serbian elections; a candid reference to the 'hardship period' through which the country had been passing; an assurance that a certain nuclear power plant would be closed as part of a deal with Washington. Tiny cracks, to be sure. But a complete and rigid edifice cannot afford fissures, however small. There appear to be no hookers, as yet, in Pyongyang. Yet if casinos come, can working girls be far behind? One perhaps ought not to wish for hookers, but there are circumstances when corruption is the only hope.
Christopher Hitchens (Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays)
Bosnia is known as the powder keg of Yugoslavia, which itself is known as the powder keg of the Balkans, which in turn is reputed to be the powder keg of Europe. I would like to lengthen the list a bit by noting that Slobodan Milosevic was the powder keg of Bosnia. He is also one of the most extraordinary men you could hope to meet in your lifetime, a Halley's Comet of dictators, appearing once or twice a century. p. 199
Peter Maas
Well, then. Hungary borders, in the south, on the Danube and Serbia... and the Rumanian... Dalmatian... and Serbia... and the capital of Serbia.., and the Serbia of capital...
Frigyes Karinthy (Please Sir!)
Babe i žabe ('just say no to Greater Serbia, Greater Croatia and Islamic State!')
John Farebrother (The Damned Balkans: A Refugee Road Trip)
Muslim caliphs Arabicised this name and issued ‘dinars’. The dinar is still the official name of the currency in Jordan, Iraq, Serbia, Macedonia, Tunisia and several other countries.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
You have heard, no doubt, of the appalling superstition that prevails in Upper and Lower Styria, in Moravia, Silesia, in Turkish Serbia, in Poland, even in Russia; the superstition, so we must call it, of the Vampire.
J. Sheridan Le Fanu (Carmilla)
More than any other nation, the United States has been almost constantly involved in armed conflict and, through military alliances, has used war as a means of resolving international and local disputes. Since the birth of the United Nations, we have seen American forces involved in combat in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Greece, Grenada, Haiti, Iraq, Korea, Kosovo, Kuwait, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Nicaragua, Panama, Serbia, Somalia, and Vietnam, and more recently with lethal attacks in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, and other sovereign nations. There were no “boots on the ground” in some of these countries; instead we have used high-altitude bombers or remote-control drones. In these cases we rarely acknowledge the tremendous loss of life and prolonged suffering among people in the combat zones, even after our involvement in the conflict is ended.
Jimmy Carter (A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power)
The United States and its NATO Alliance constitute the greatest collection of genocidal states ever assembled in the entire history of the world. If anything the United Nations Organization and its member states bear a “responsibility to protect” the U.S.’ and NATO’s intended victims from their repeated aggressions as it should have done for Haiti, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, now Syria, and perhaps tomorrow, Iran. The United States and the NATO Alliance together with their de facto allies such as Israel constitute the real Axis of Genocide in the modern world. Humanity itself owes a “responsibility to protect” the very future existence of the world from the United States, the NATO states, and Israel.
Francis A. Boyle (Destroying Libya and World Order: The Three-Decade U.S. Campaign to Terminate the Qaddafi Revolution)
In one area in Serbia two villages have been reduced to ashes. In Greece 220 men of one village have been shot. In France there are extensive shootings while I write. Certainly more than a thousand people are murdered in this way every day and another thousand German men are habituated to murder. May I know this and yet sit at my table in my heated flat and have tea? What shall I say when I am asked: And what did you do during that time? How can anyone know these things and still walk around free?
Helmuth James von Moltke (Briefe an Freya 1939-1945)
IT IS HARD to think of many democracies that were not born in some manner out of war, violence, or coercion—beginning with the first example of Cleisthenic Athens in 507 B.C., and including our own revolution in 1776. The best examples are those of the twentieth century, when many of the most successful present-day constitutional governments were epiphenomena of war, imposed by the victors or coalition partners, as we have seen in the cases of Germany, Japan, Italy, South Korea, and more recently Grenada, Liberia, Panama, Serbia—and Afghanistan and Iraq.
Victor Davis Hanson (The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern)
We play in twelve rounds. The present against me. I lost the previous eleven. Defeat after defeat. And now I am waiting for the last round. The key round. The fact that I did not fall so far gives me more strength. It’s only now that I hope to win, by knock-out, because the fate is too tired from punches that it will eventually fall by itself. And maybe it will fall on knees when it realizes that I am not going to fall.
Slaviša Pavlović
This domain name has been seized as a part of a law enforcement operation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Defence Criminal Investigative Service, Cyber Field Office and European law enforcement agencies acting throughout Europe, Serbia, Australia, and Canada, in cooperation with Europol.
Lauren James (An Unauthorized Fan Treatise (Gottie Writes, #0))
So anxious was the tsar to keep the Balkan states faithful to Russia, it was asserted, that he intended ‘to utilize his four daughters, who are not to marry four Russian Grand Dukes, nor even four unorthodox Princes of Europe’. No, the four grand duchesses of Russia, so the rumour went, were to become ‘Queens of the Balkans’, with Olga a bride for Prince George of Serbia; Tatiana for Prince George of Greece; Maria for Prince Carol of Romania and Anastasia set for Prince Boris of Bulgaria – although other press reports had gone so far as to claim that Boris was in fact about to be betrothed to Olga.29
Helen Rappaport (The Romanov Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Daughters of Nicholas and Alexandra (The Romanov Sisters #2))
On June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, Serbia, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated. He was Archduke Franz Ferdinand, an otherwise useless piece of royalty, and to this day I have never been able to understand why this event could cause Germany to invade Belgium a month later. I
Robert A. Heinlein (To Sail Beyond the Sunset)
Yet the Soviet elite, and the Communist regimes through most of eastern Europe (Romania and Serbia were the exceptions), chose not to use even a tiny fraction of this military power. When its members realised that Communism was bankrupt, they renounced force, admitted their failure, packed their suitcases and went home.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Vampyre refers to a corpse that has returned from the dead to drink the blood of the living. Similar creatures were said to haunt the rural villages of nearly every Slavic nation. Not surprisingly, each culture gave their monster its own name (e.g., vukodlak in Serbia, strigoii in Romania, eretika in Russia, insurance salesman in…well, never mind).
Bill Schutt
Can someone please tell me where Croatia is on this map?” Jacob groaned. “Like is there a song I can come up with that will somehow remind me of this?” “Hungary, Slovenia, Bosnia,” I said, pointing at the blank map of Europe. “And then there is Serbia.” Jacob glared at me. “Fucking overachieving bitch.” I popped a red Skittle in my mouth. “Sorry.
J. Lynn (Wait for You (Wait for You, #1))
Tisina je moj maternji jezik.
Tamara Stamenkovic
Jedino kad žmurim Ne brojim ti poglede Poklonjene drugima, A ne meni.
Đorđe Simić (Pitomi vulkan)
Meanwhile in the East, within weeks of abandoning their harvest fields, shops and lathes, newly mobilised Russian, Austrian and German soldiers met in huge clashes; tiny Serbia inflicted a succession of defeats on the Austrians which left the Hapsburg Empire reeling, having by Christmas suffered 1.27 million casualties at Serb and Russian hands, amounting to one in three of its soldiers mobilised.
Max Hastings (Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War)
In our twenty-first century world, the terms "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" sit uneasily in the mind, associated with some of our darkest and most disturbing thoughts about human nature. They conjure Darfur, Serbia, Cambodia, and Pol Pot, and, most vividly of all for many of us, the horrors in Europe before and during World War II. "Species cleansing," on the other hand, is not a term that falls readily to hand, although we have engaged in it without much remorse for at least 10,000 years and probably more. Be it North American mammoths, driven to annihilation ten millennia ago by bands of a near-professional hunting culture known as Clovis ... to passenger pigeons and ivory-billed woodpeckers ... in twentieth century America, humans are ancient veterans of the art of species cleansing, ...
Dan Flores (Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History)
Yet it is also a tonic and an antidote to dullness to be with the Serbs. They possess the irresponsible gaiety that we traditionally connect with the Irish, with whom they have often been compared. Other less convenient sides of the Irish character are also typical in the Serbs, such as a cheerful contempt for punctuality in daily life and a ready willingness, arising clearly from politeness and good nature, to make promises that are not always fulfilled. But perhaps the most pronounced of these similarities is to be found in the songs of Serbia and Ireland. With both peoples the historic songs about the past are songs of sorrow, or noble struggles against overwhelming odds, of failure redeemed by unconquerable resolve. There is nothing strange in this combination of laughing gaiety and profound melancholy. It is often only those who are truly capable of the one emotion who also have the faculty for the other.
R.G.D. Laffan
U begu od nesreće, doživljavao sam skup razočarenja koji su je svojom snagom prevazilazili, čak i u toj meri da mi se činilo da je bolje da sam nesreću sačekao raširenih ruku. Ali, kako da se predam zlu kad osećam da postoji dobro?
Slaviša Pavlović
Since 1945, when Jesus granted America air superiority, we have bombed Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Granada, Panama, Iraq, Serbia, Somalia, Bosnia, The Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Yemen. And Yemen only because the tenth one was free. How did we inherit this moral obligation of bringing justice to the world via death from above? Are we Zeus? It doesn't make any sense. Our schools are crumbling and we wanna teach everyone else a lesson.
Bill Maher
-the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta-Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite all the abundant evidence to the contrary surrounding her. She felt that the sniper was essentially a good man because during the siege, she said, he had often shot over her and her husband's heads to warn them that he was watching and that they shouldn't move so carelessly in their own apartment.
Aleksandar Hemon (The Book of My Lives)
Los estados se fundamentan en mitos nacionales comunes. Dos serbios que nunca se hayan visto antes pueden arriesgar su vida para salvar el uno al otro porque ambos creen en la existencia de la nación serbia, en la patria serbia y en la bandera serbia. Los sistemas judiciales se sostienen sobre mitos legales comunes. Sin embargo, dos abogados que no se conocen de nada pueden combinar sus esfuerzos para defender a un completo extraño porque todos creen en la existencia de leyes, justicia, derechos humanos… y en el dinero que se desembolsa en sus honorarios.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens. De animales a dioses: Una breve historia de la humanidad)
The United States and NATO took advantage of Russian weakness and, despite promises to the contrary, expanded NATO to Eastern Europe and even to some former Soviet republics. The West went on to ignore Russian interests in the Middle East, invaded Serbia and Iraq on doubtful pretexts, and generally made it very clear to Russia that it can count only on its own military power to protect its sphere of influence from Western incursions. From this perspective, recent Russian military moves can be blamed on Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as much as on Vladimir Putin.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
Five months after Zoran's disappearance, his wife gave birth to a girl. The mother was unable to nurse the child. The city was being shelled continuously. There were severe food shortages. Infants, like the infirm and the elderly, were dying in droves. The family gave the baby tea for five days, but she began to fade. "She was dying," Rosa Sorak said. "It was breaking our hearts." Fejzić, meanwhile, was keeping his cow in a field on the eastern edge of Goražde, milking it at night to avoid being hit by Serbian snipers. "On the fifth day, just before dawn, we heard someone at the door," said Rosa Sorak. "It was Fadil Fejzić in his black rubber boots. He handed up half a liter of milk he came the next morning, and the morning after that, and after that. Other families on the street began to insult him. They told him to give his milk to Muslims, to let the Chetnik children die. He never said a word. He refused our money. He came 442 days, until my daughter-in-law and granddaughter left Goražde for Serbia." The Soraks eventually left and took over a house that once belonged to a Muslim family in the Serbian-held town of Kopaci. Two miles to the east. They could no longer communicate with Fejzić. The couple said they grieved daily for their sons. They missed their home. They said they could never forgive those who took Zoran from them. But they also said that despite their anger and loss, they could not listen to other Sebs talking about Muslims, or even recite their own sufferings, without telling of Fejzić and his cow. Here was the power of love. What this illiterate farmer did would color the life of another human being, who might never meet him, long after he was gone, in his act lay an ocean of hope.
Chris Hedges (War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning)
But old tensions and enmities persisted. Britain’s King George V loathed his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany’s supreme ruler; and Wilhelm, in turn, envied Britain’s expansive collection of colonies and its command of the seas, so much so that in 1900 Germany began a campaign to build warships in enough quantity and of large enough scale to take on the British navy. This in turn drove Britain to begin an extensive modernization of its own navy, for which it created a new class of warship, the Dreadnought, which carried guns of a size and power never before deployed at sea. Armies swelled in size as well. To keep pace with each other, France and Germany introduced conscription. Nationalist fervor was on the rise. Austria-Hungary and Serbia shared a simmering mutual resentment. The Serbs nurtured pan-Slavic ambitions that threatened the skein of territories and ethnicities that made up the Austro-Hungarian empire (typically referred to simply as Austria). These included such restive lands as Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Croatia. As one historian put it, “Europe had too many frontiers, too many—and too well-remembered—histories, too many soldiers for safety.
Erik Larson (Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania)
On 28th July Austria declares war on Serbia. On 29th July the Emperor declares: ‘I put my faith in my peoples, who have always gathered round my throne, in unity and loyalty, through every tempest, who have always been ready for the heaviest sacrifices for the honour, the majesty, the power of the Fatherland.’ On 1st August Germany declares war on Russia. On the 3rd Germany declares war on France, and then the following day invades neutral Belgium. And the whole pack of cards falls: alliances are invoked and Britain declares war on Germany. On 6th August Austria declares war on Russia.
Edmund de Waal (The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss)
This questioning of pronouns started in the former Yugoslavia, which after terrible wars between 1991 and 2006 was divided into six republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia. In that environment of war and hypermasculinity, patriotism was made up of a mixture of nationalism, patriarchy, and misogyny. Masculinity was defined by power, violence, and conquest. Women and girls from one’s own group had to be protected—and impregnated to provide children for the nation. Those on the enemy’s side were systematically raped and tortured, both to impregnate the women and humiliate the men.
Isabel Allende (The Soul of a Woman)
Moji suborci i ja nismo pravili razliku između ljudi koje smo branili, a ja nisam ni znao tko je Srbin, a tko Hrvat. Nikome od nas to nije bilo važno niti smo o tome pričali. Dok se srpski civili prijavljuju vojsci da su Srbi, usput nas prokazuju, a najgore od svega je to što optužuju bez razloga izmišljajući nebulozne zločine.
Vilim Karlović (Preživio sam Vukovar i Ovčaru)
Schweik inspected the provost-marshal's office. The impression which it produced could scarcely be called a favorable one, especially with regard to the photographs on the walls. They were photographs of the various executions carried out by the army in Galicia and Serbia. Artistic photographs of cottages which had been burned down and of trees, the branches of which were burdened with hanging bodies. There was one particularly fine photograph from Serbia showing a whole family which had been hanged. A small boy with his father and mother. Two soldiers with bayonets were guarding the tree on which the execution had been carried out, and an officer was standing victoriously in the foreground smoking a cigarette.
Jaroslav Hašek (The Good Soldier Švejk)
The conflict in Serbia inflamed Russia’s wounded pride over its deflated status since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The new Russia lacked the ability to shape world events, which made the American-led actions even harder to swallow. Yeltsin berated President Clinton, insisting that an intervention was forbidden by international law, only to be ignored. Russia resented the fact that the United States and its expanding NATO alliance were acting as if they could impose their will on the new world order without regard to Russia’s interests. Even worse, the conflict in Kosovo had striking parallels to the one in Chechnya, and even Russians not prone to paranoia could imagine a NATO campaign on behalf of Chechnya’s independence movement.
Steven Lee Myers (The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin)
The time, as it seemed to me, did come, and we went into the fight. I am glad we did. We seem to have lost. We have not lost. To refuse to fight would have been to lose; to fight is to win. We have kept faith with the past, and handed on a tradition to the future....I assume that I am speaking to Englishmen, who value their freedom and who profess to be fighting for the freedom of Belgium and Serbia. Believe that we, too, love freedom and desire it. To us it is more desirable than anything in the world. If you strike us down now, we shall rise again and renew the fight. You cannot conquer Ireland. You cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.
Shane Paul O'Doherty (The Volunteer : A Former IRA Man's True Story)
The Russians had long historical ties to Serbia, which we largely ignored. Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching. The roots of the Russian Empire trace back to Kiev in the ninth century, so that was an especially monumental provocation. Were the Europeans, much less the Americans, willing to send their sons and daughters to defend Ukraine or Georgia? Hardly. So NATO expansion was a political act, not a carefully considered military commitment, thus undermining the purpose of the alliance and recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests. Similarly, Putin’s hatred of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (limiting the number and location of Russian and NATO nonnuclear military forces in Europe) was understandable.
Robert M. Gates (Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War)
As far as Serge can tell, Sophie only takes breakfast, and doesn’t even seem to eat that: each time he visits her lab over the next few days he sees sandwiches piled up virtually untouched beside glasses of lemonade that, no more than sipped at, are growing viscid bubbles on their surface like Aphrophora spumaria. Above these, on the wall, the texts, charts and diagrams are growing, spreading. Serge reads, for example, a report on the branchiae of Cercopidida, which are, apparently, “extremely tenuous, appearing like clusters of filaments forming lamellate appendages,” and scrutinises the architecture of Vespa germanica nests: their subterranean shafts and alleyways, their space-filled envelopes and alveolae … Bizarrely, Sophie’s started interspersing among these texts and images the headlines she’s torn from each day’s newspapers. These clippings seem to be caught up in her strange associative web: they, too, have certain words and letters highlighted and joined to ones among the scientific notes that, Serge presumes, must correspond to them in some way or another. One of these reads “Serbia Unsatisfied by London Treaty”; another, “Riot at Paris Ballet.” Serge can see no logical connection between these events and Sophie’s studies; yet colours and lines connect them. Arching over all of these in giant letters, each one occupying a whole sheet of paper, crayon-shaded and conjoined by lines that run over the wall itself to other terms and letter-sequences among the sprawling mesh, is the word Hymenoptera. “Hymenoptera?” Serge reads. “What’s that? It sounds quite rude.” “Sting in the tail,” she answers somewhat cryptically. “The groups contain the common ancestor, but not all the descendants. Paraphyletic: it’s all connected.” She stares at her expanded chart for a long while, lost in its vectors and relays—then, registering his continued presence with a slight twitch of her head, tells him to leave once more.
Tom McCarthy (C)
Why did those governments decide to murder their own people? Why did soldiers and police and barbers and mechanics murder their own neighbors? I think the answer is self-interest. Particular people in a government of a single ideology with effectively no political opponents have supported national institutions that maintain power for themselves. What muddied the waters were the “reasons” the decision makers gave for their political agendas. Take Kosovo: were the killings and expulsions in the 1990s really meant to avenge the Battle of 1389, as Serbian president Slobodan Milošević was fond of stating? Or was it because mineral-rich parts of Kosovo can produce up to $5 billion in annual export income for Serbia? Or take Rwanda: did Hutus kill their neighbors and all their neighbors’ children simply because they were Tutsi, as the government exhorted them to do? Or was it because the government promised Hutus their neighbors’ farmland, land that otherwise could only have been inherited by those very children, and those children’s children, ad infinitum?
Clea Koff (The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist's Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo)
The Germans suffered 800,000 casualties in the same period, including three times as many dead as during the entire Franco-Prussian War. This also represented a higher rate of loss than at any later period of the war. The British in August fought two actions, at Mons and Le Cateau, which entered their national legend. In October their small force was plunged into the three-week nightmare of the First Battle of Ypres. The line was narrowly held, with a larger French and Belgian contribution than chauvinists acknowledge, but much of the old British Army reposes forever in the region’s cemeteries: four times as many soldiers of the King perished in 1914 as during the three years of the Boer War. Meanwhile in the East, within weeks of abandoning their harvest fields, shops and lathes, newly mobilised Russian, Austrian and German soldiers met in huge clashes; tiny Serbia inflicted a succession of defeats on the Austrians which left the Hapsburg Empire reeling, having by Christmas suffered 1.27 million casualties at Serb and Russian hands, amounting to one in three of its soldiers mobilised.
Max Hastings (Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War)
point of comparison, over the previous century, during which it had expanded its empire to five continents, the British Empire had been involved in some forty different conflicts around the globe—colonial insurrections mostly, but including the Crimean and Boer wars—and had lost some forty thousand soldiers in the process. Over the next four years, it would lose over twenty times that number. In the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, France had suffered an estimated 270,000 battlefield casualties; in the present war, it was to surpass that number in the first three weeks. In this conflict, Germany would see 13 percent of its military-age male population killed, Serbia 15 percent of its total population, while in just a two-year span, 1913 to 1915, the life expectancy of a French male would drop from fifty years to twenty-seven. So inured would the architects of the carnage become to such statistics that at the launch of his 1916 Somme offensive, British general Douglas Haig could look over the first day’s casualty rolls—with fifty-eight thousand Allied soldiers dead or wounded, it remains the bloodiest single day in the history of the English-speaking world—and judge that the numbers “cannot be considered severe.” The effect of all this on the collective European
Scott Anderson (Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East)
There is far more to the Islamic way of life than fasting and segregating women, of course. Praying five times a day, avoiding alcohol, the custom of eating with the right hand, leaving the left for ablutions and many health measures associated with Islam, such as ritual washing. Then there is the Qur’an itself and the sonorous power of the Arabic language, with an attractive system of ethics including a focus on alms-giving and the equality of believers. Putting all this together created a powerful religious technology which made its followers more aggressive, confident, united and with a higher birth rate than any competing civilization. [...] People in the West see the traditional culture of the Muslim Middle East as primitive and “backward,” and there are constant calls for modernization. In fact, as had been seen, Islamic culture is anything but backward. Civilization first arose in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan. It is no coincidence that these lands, with the longest experience of civilization, are now strongly and fervently Muslim. Long experience of civilization has bred a high-S genotype and culture which perfectly adapt people to survive and expand their numbers in dense agricultural and urban populations. Such countries tend to be poor (if we leave out the anomalous effects of oil wealth), since their peoples lack the temperament for industrialization. But wealth at that level is of no benefit in the long-term struggle for survival and success. To paraphrase Christian scripture, what does it benefit a civilization if it gains wealth but loses its strength and vigor? The advantages of Islam can be clearly seen in countries with mixed populations. Lebanon once had a Christian majority but is now 54% Muslim. In Communist Yugoslavia the provinces with Muslim populations grew much faster and received tax revenue from the wealthier Christian states. The population of Kosovo, the spiritual homeland of Christian Serbia, grew from 733,000 in 1948 to over two million in 1994, with the Muslim component surging from 68% to 90%, and lately going even higher. Meanwhile, Muslims are migrating into Europe where Christianity is in decline, the birth rate is far below replacement level, and people no longer have much faith in their own culture. Over the next few decades, as the next chapter will indicate, the native peoples of the West will become feebler and fewer. This means that on current trends Europe will become an Islamic continent in a century or so. The 1,400-year struggle between Islam and the West is coming to end. pp. 227 & 229-230
Jim Penman (Biohistory: Decline and Fall of the West)
ALL POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES ARE uprooted ones because Communism uprooted traditions, so nothing fits with anything else,” explained the philosopher Patapievici. Fifteen years earlier, when I had last met him, he had cautioned: “The task for Romania is to acquire a public style based on impersonal rules, otherwise business and politics will be full of intrigue, and I am afraid that our Eastern Orthodox tradition is not helpful in this regard. Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Russia, Greece—all the Orthodox nations of Europe—are characterized by weak institutions. That is because Orthodoxy is flexible and contemplative, based more on the oral traditions of peasants than on texts. So there is this pattern of rumor, lack of information, and conspiracy….”11 Thus, in 1998, did Patapievici define Romanian politics as they were still being practiced a decade and a half later. Though in 2013, he added: “No one speaks of guilt over the past. The Church has made no progress despite the enormous chance of being separated from the state for almost a quarter century. The identification of religious faith with an ethnic-national group, I find, is a moral heresy.” Dressed now in generic business casual and wearing fashionable glasses, Patapievici appeared as a figure wholly of the West—more accurately of the global elite—someone you might meet at a fancy
Robert D. Kaplan (In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond)
The Soviet collapse in 1989 was even more peaceful, despite the eruption of ethnic conflict in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Never before has such a mighty empire disappeared so swiftly and so quietly. The Soviet Empire of 1989 had suffered no military defeat except in Afghanistan, no external invasions, no rebellions, nor even large-scale Martin Luther King-style campaigns of civil disobedience. The Soviets still had millions of soldiers, tens of thousands of tanks and aeroplanes, and enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the whole of humankind several times over. The Red Army and the other Warsaw Pact armies remained loyal. Had the last Soviet ruler, Mikhail Gorbachev, given the order, the Red Army would have opened fire on the subjugated masses. Yet the Soviet elite, and the Communist regimes through most of eastern Europe (Romania and Serbia were the exceptions), chose not to use even a tiny fraction of this military power. When its members realised that Communism was bankrupt, they renounced force, admitted their failure, packed their suitcases and went home. Gorbachev and his colleagues gave up without a struggle not only the Soviet conquests of World War Two, but also the much older tsarist conquests in the Baltic, the Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia. It is chilling to contemplate what might have happened if Gorbachev had behaved like the Serbian leadership – or like the French in Algeria.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
What are the implications of ethnic identity for multi-racial and multi-ethnic societies? Tatu Vanhanen of the University of Tampere, Finland, has probably researched the effects of ethnic diversity more systematically than anyone else. In a massive, book-length study, he measured ethnic diversity and levels of conflict in 148 countries, and found correlations in the 0.5 to 0.9 range for the two variables, depending on how the variables were defined and measured. Homogeneous countries like Japan and Iceland show very low levels of conflict, while highly diverse countries like Lebanon and Sudan are wracked with strife. Prof. Vanhanen found tension in all multi-ethnic societies: “Interest conflicts between ethnic groups are inevitable because ethnic groups are genetic kinship groups and because the struggle for existence concerns the survival of our own genes through our own and our relatives’ descendants.” Prof. Vanhanen also found that economic and political institutions make no difference; wealthy, democratic countries suffer from sectarian strife as much as poor, authoritarian ones: “Ethnic nepotism belongs to human nature and . . . it is independent from the level of socioeconomic development (modernization) and also from the degree of democratization.” Others have argued that democracy is particularly vulnerable to ethnic tensions while authoritarian regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Tito’s Yugoslavia can give the impression of holding it in check. One expert writing in Foreign Affairs explained that for democracy to work “the party or group that loses has to trust the new majority and believe that its basic interests will still be protected and that there is nothing to fear from a change in power.” He wrote that this was much less likely when opposing parties represent different races or ethnicities. The United Nations found that from 1989 to 1992 there were 82 conflicts that had resulted in at least 1,000 deaths each. Of these, no fewer than 79, or 96 percent, were ethnic or religious conflicts that took place within the borders of recognized states. Only three were cross-border conflicts. Wars between nations are usually ethnic conflicts as well. Internal ethnic conflict has very serious consequences. As J. Philippe Rushton has argued, “The politics of ethnic identity are increasingly replacing the politics of class as the major threat to the stability of nations.” One must question the wisdom of then-president Bill Clinton’s explanation for the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia: “[T]he principle we and our allies have been fighting for in the Balkans is the principle of multi-ethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy. We have been fighting against the idea that statehood must be based entirely on ethnicity.” That same year, the American supreme commander of NATO, Wesley Clark, was even more direct: “There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th century idea and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.
Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)
And here’s the tricky part: every time we run this exercise, in which we ask people to imagine what’s important to their fellow countrymen, no one ever speaks of things like civil rights, or freedom of religion, or the right to assemble. Those are big things. Instead, people—in the Maldives, in Syria, in Serbia—talk about the little things: they want respect and dignity, they want their families to be safe, and they want honest pay for honest work. That’s it. It’s never sweeping stuff. Too often, however, dissidents fail to realize that it’s the mundane things that move people. Well-educated and passionate, these aspiring revolutionaries focus on lofty quotations from historical leaders and abstract ideas of liberty, forgetting that their constituent is a tired shopkeeper whose needs and thoughts and beliefs are far more basic.
Srdja Popovic (Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World)
I don't see what great things Russia could offer these countries. You can certainly try to court members of the political elite. You can sound the call of the old Orthodox solidarity, as is being attempted in Moldova, Bulgaria, Serbia and also Greece. But Moscow cannot "save" Greece if it goes bankrupt, nor can Moscow draw the country permanently into its orbit. Intensive efforts are being made at cobbling together a network of old left-wing and new right-wing groups, platforms and media. There's also the phantom-like launch of the "Eurasia" project - as a counter to Europe's transatlantic relations. Politically, however, that's all largely destructive and hot air.
Anonymous
many women and children, looking ragged and half starved, but significantly we saw very few men, for all had either been killed or they were in the ranks of Serbia’s still existing and valiant little army. All this time trains full of German soldiers were passing us or standing on the switches at the stations where we slowed up, a sufficient explanation for all the misery and devastation we saw on our way.
Henry Morgenthau Sr. (Ambassador Morgenthau's story [Illustrated Edition])
For Allan’s father, the whole thing had acquired a personal dimension since Lenin had forbidden all private ownership of land the very day after Allan’s father had purchased 130 square feet on which to grow Swedish strawberries. “The land didn’t cost more than four rubles, but they won’t get away with nationalizing my strawberry patch,” wrote Allan’s father in his very last letter home, concluding: “Now it’s war!” And war it certainly was—all the time. In just about every part of the world, and it had been going on for several years. It had broken out about a year before little Allan had got his errand-boy job at Nitroglycerin Ltd. While Allan loaded his boxes with dynamite, he listened to the workers’ comments on events. He wondered how they could know so much, but above all he marveled at how much misery grown men could cause. Austria declared war on Serbia. Germany declared war on Russia. Then, Germany conquered Luxembourg a day before declaring war on France and invading Belgium. Great Britain then declared war on Germany, Austria declared war on Russia, and Serbia declared war on Germany. And on it went. The Japanese joined in, as did the Americans. In the months after the Czar abdicated, the British took Baghdad for some reason, and then Jerusalem. The Greeks and Bulgarians started to fight each other while the Arabs continued their revolt against the Ottomans…. So “Now it’s war!” was right.
Jonas Jonasson (The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared (The Hundred-Year-Old Man #1))
I was put in charge, made a general, and sent into Serbia, where, by dint of my own ingenuity, we served honorably but did not kill a soul. And that, believe me, is very hard with the Serbs, because they are very ingenious themselves, and they have a passion for martyrdom. "I've been a field marshal for two years. I have so many medals that when I wear them I look like a window in a junk shop.
Mark Helprin (A Soldier of the Great War)
Misli su uvek nečije. Moje su tvoje. Osvrćem se oko sebe. Gde si? Grad mi je pred očima i iza leđa, pulsira, tmulo, tmasto. Ukorenjeni ritam večne pretnje, svireposti koja ne bira kada će da udari.
Sreten Ugričić
Siene su tihe, nad provalijom. U tom bezizlaznom položaju ćemo ostati, ti i ja, ni gore ni dole, ni napred ni nazad, ni pre ni posle, zauvek. Jer to i jesmo - nad provalijom.
Sreten Ugričić
Nedavno je izazvala znatnu medijsku gužvu izjavivši da redovno, svakih šest meseci, daje krv na analizu СРБ-testom. - Svako treba da bude nacionalno odgovoran - kaže Drina - to je deo ljudske i građanske pristojnosti, da se svako srpsko biće testira. Odvratno je ako to ljudi ne rade, u ovo vreme kada naši neprijatelji raspolažu podmuklim tehnologijama koje mogu na daljinu da izazovu mutiranje gena i neprimetnu strukturnu transformaciju elemenata krvne plazme. Ne testirati se- izričita je Dina Hadžiosmanović - to je neodgovorno i gnusno i samo po sebi bolesno.
Sreten Ugričić
Svi umiru u Србији. Србијa je dezinformacija. Svi živimo u inostranstvu. Život je umiranje, znali mi to ili ne. Smrt živi sa nama kroz naše postojanje, a kada umremo, vraćamo se u besmrtnost. U besmrtnosti nema života zato što nema smrti. Može se umreti samo jednom ili nikad.
Sreten Ugričić (Neznanom junaku)
Svi mi živimo u inostranstvu. Svi umiremo u Србији.
Sreten Ugričić (Neznanom junaku)
Neka ostane onda u toj crkvi od tišine i pokajanja i milosti, neka ostane čedan i beskrajan u svojoj besmrtnosti, neka ostane dete, zaslužio je, pomišljaš. Vera je njegova tiha i divna, pomišljam, neka takva i ostane. Šta će mu da se vaskrsnut vraća u Србију i da odrasta, i da upravlja Srbima i isihastima, kad je to toliko strašno i nemoguće i smelo i nebitno. Jer naša Србија jeziva je i divna u isto vreme i uvek i ovako i onako i tu se ništa ne može.
Sreten Ugričić (Neznanom junaku)
Institucije su tu da nelegitimno učine legalnim i da nelegalno učine legitimnim. Nezakonite se sistematski pretvara u zakonito ponašanje, a istovremeno ono što je direktno kršenje pozitivnih zakonskih ili socijalno-moralnih normi postaje uzorno, potpuno prirodno ponašanje koje se očekuje i koje uređuje odnose. To je istinita definicija našega stanja. O tome razmenjujemo misli i znamo: građani Србије osuđeni su na milost i nemilost Србије.
Sreten Ugričić
secreta y terrorista de nombre poético: la Mano Negra. La organización propugna, con medios no siempre muy diplomáticos, la unificación de todos los yugoslavos en torno a Serbia, que es, según el coronel, el principal
El País (Entender la Primera Guerra Mundial)
Negra. La organización propugna, con medios no siempre muy diplomáticos, la unificación de todos los yugoslavos en torno a Serbia, que es, según el coronel, el principal Estado eslavo de los Balcanes. En el extranjero
El País (Entender la Primera Guerra Mundial)
It was here that Lieutenant Thomas Kettle fell, leading a company of the 9th Royal Dublin Fusiliers just ahead of Lieutenant Emmet Dalton – who won a Military Cross in the engagement, acquired the nickname ‘Ginchy’, later became IRA Director of Munitions, and was to reach the rank of general in the army of independent Ireland. Kettle was a former Irish nationalist MP and Professor of National Economics at University College Dublin, who had been in Belgium at the beginning of the war buying guns for the nationalist Irish Volunteers. He joined up believing that the war had a just cause, being fought on behalf of small nations such as Belgium, Serbia and Ireland too. But he had been dispirited by the Easter Rising in Dublin. While he had no sympathy with the rebels, he correctly predicted how posterity might view him vis-à-vis the 1916 leaders. ‘These men,’ he wrote, ‘will go down in history as heroes and martyrs, and I will go down – if I go down at all – as a bloody British officer.
Keith Jeffery (1916: A Global History)
Jelena Gencic was born in October 1936 to a Serb father and Austrian mother.
Chris Bowers (Novak Djokovic and the Rise of Serbia: The Sporting Statesman)
others helped Austria-Hungary carry out a ruthless occupation of Serbia. When the war ended, that tiny country would have proportionately the highest death toll, military and civilian, of any combatant, nearly one out of five of its people.
Adam Hochschild (To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918)
Go away and scratch your butt.” (Go away) – Norwegian “Lick my butt” (Go away) – France “Drop dead, you redneck ox!” (Go Away) – Serbia
Full Sea Books (Hollywood’s Favorite Insults and More: The Greatest TV & Movie Insults!)
For centuries European governments had granted monopolies on all kinds of production and trade to their loyal subjects. These weren’t gifts; the governments required payment in return, in the form of cash, interest, or a share of profits. These “fiscal monopolies” were an alternative to state control: industry remained in private hands, but governments received a steady stream of revenue, a kind of selective tax. The early fiscal monopolies included cigarettes, flax, gunpowder, liquor, petrol, playing cards, salt, and tobacco. For many countries, the tax revenues from fiscal monopolies were significant, as much as one-third or more of the overall government budget.1 France created one of the first match monopolies, in 1872, not long after the invention of strike-on-the-box Swedish matches. The transaction was straightforward: the French government simply leased the right to make and sell matches within France to a private corporation. Other countries soon followed France’s lead. Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, and Spain all established fiscal match monopolies during the late nineteenth century.2 In France, when government officials finally realized how much money the private sector was earning from the match monopoly, they nationalized the industry. But elsewhere, the monopolies stuck.
Frank Partnoy (The Match King: Ivar Kreuger and the Financial Scandal of the Century)
On July 10, as the Austrian Foreign Ministry was drafting its ultimatum to Serbia, thousands of British naval reservists began arriving at manning depots, where they were issued uniforms and boarded their assigned ships. By July 16, the Second and Third Fleets had sailed from their home ports to join the First Fleet for the royal review at Spithead, between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. On July 17, King George arrived and the First Lord, bursting with pride, presented the monarch with a fleet that Churchill declared to be “incomparably the greatest assemblage of naval power ever witnessed in the history of the world.” On
Robert K. Massie (Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany and the Winning of the Great War at Sea)
War came to Europe in convulsive spasms: first Austria against Serbia, then Russia against Austria, then Germany against Russia, then Germany against France, and finally Germany against Great Britain.
Robert K. Massie (Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany and the Winning of the Great War at Sea)
he married Mileva Olivera, the daughter of Prince Lazar, and named Lazar’s son as the sole ruler of Serbia,
Billy Wellman (The Ottoman Empire: An Enthralling Guide to One of the Mightiest and Longest-Lasting Dynasties in World History (Europe))
Aided by the Knights Hospitaller, Prince Lazar of Serbia and King Tvrtko of Bosnia led about twenty thousand men
Billy Wellman (The Ottoman Empire: An Enthralling Guide to One of the Mightiest and Longest-Lasting Dynasties in World History (Europe))
Austria-Hungary, backed by its ally the German Empire, declared war on Serbia.
Hourly History (Russian Empire: A History from Beginning to End (History of Russia))
Russia had an alliance with Serbia, they began mobilization for war three days later,
Hourly History (Russian Empire: A History from Beginning to End (History of Russia))
they killed Prince Lazar of Serbia and pushed the enemy back. In the end, the outcome of the battle was inconclusive,
Billy Wellman (The Ottoman Empire: An Enthralling Guide to One of the Mightiest and Longest-Lasting Dynasties in World History (Europe))
Battle of Kosovo is remembered in Serbia today as a valiant effort on the part of the Orthodox Christians,
Billy Wellman (The Ottoman Empire: An Enthralling Guide to One of the Mightiest and Longest-Lasting Dynasties in World History (Europe))
The Ottomans ruled Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia, and Serbia.
Billy Wellman (Suleiman the Magnificent: An Enthralling Guide to the Sultan Who Ruled during the Golden Age of the Ottoman Empire)
The prospect of a NATO military intervention to protect Kosovo infuriated Russia in ways American and European leaders failed to appreciate. Serbia and Russia shared Slavic roots, religion, and culture, but Russia’s concerns went deeper. The conflict in Serbia inflamed Russia’s wounded pride over its deflated status since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The new Russia lacked the ability to shape world events, which made the American-led actions even harder to swallow.
Steven Lee Myers (The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin)
A brief autumn stroll” (einen kleinen Herbstspaziergang) was what staffers in Sarajevo, singing the tune of jingoistic journalists and politicians throughout the Dual Monarchy, expected once the troops crossed into Serbia, a rosy assessment shared even by many well-placed functionaries in Vienna. “We’ll be able to chase off the Serbs with a wet rag,” promised Lt. Col. Purtscher, chief of the Balkan operations group on the General Staff.
John R. Schindler (Fall of the Double Eagle: The Battle for Galicia and the Demise of Austria-Hungary)
Someday, maybe, the various constituent parts of America will become “empowered” the way Serbia and Croatia are. Someday Aryan Nation, NOW, the VFW, Act Up, AARP, Native Americans, Right to Life fetuses, people with Hispanic surnames, the blind, the deaf, the rest of the differently abled will have their dreams come true. Having made the drive to Slavonski Brod I now know what America will look like when it happens.
P.J. O'Rourke (Thrown Under the Omnibus: A Reader)
We are in Serbia. Tomorrow or the next day is Hungary. This is where the real struggle begins, he says. Sweat drips wet and metallic onto my face, into my mouth. How can it possibly get any worse? It will never happen. I will never reach the end. My life is here, in the ebb and flow of humans pushing and being shoved back across borders, shuttled from detention center to filthy campground to open fields and rocky beaches. This is to be my life.
Layla AlAmmar (Silence Is a Sense)
Similarly, Bangladesh CFR, Senegal, Pakistan, Serbia, Nigeria, Turkey, and Ukraine all allow unrestricted use of HCQ and all have miniscule case fatality rates compared to the countries that ban HCQ.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Russia, Greece—all the Orthodox nations of Europe—are characterized by weak institutions. That is because Orthodoxy is flexible and contemplative, based more on the oral traditions of peasants than on texts. So there is this pattern of rumor, lack of information, and conspiracy….”11
Robert D. Kaplan (In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond)