Spain Quotes

I can remember when I was a bit of an ETA fan myself. It was in 1973, when a group of Basque militants assassinated Adm. Carrero Blanco. The admiral was a stone-faced secret police chief, personally groomed to be the successor to the decrepit Francisco Franco. His car blew up, killing only him and his chauffeur with a carefully planted charge, and not only was the world well rid of another fascist, but, more important, the whole scheme of extending Franco's rule was vaporized in the same instant. The dictator had to turn instead to Crown Prince Juan Carlos, who turned out to be the best Bourbon in history and who swiftly dismantled Franco's entire system. If this action was 'terrorism,' it had something to be said for it. Everyone I knew in Spain made a little holiday in their hearts when the gruesome admiral went sky-high.

Christopher Hitchens

You aren't happy," Estela says."I can't be happy," I say."Look at me, Kenzie.""I'm looking at you, Estela.""Do you know your own heart?""I don't know anything.""Go," she says, "and think. And don't come back until you know.

At the beginning, I thought the best Islamic work was in Spain - the mosque in Cordoba, the Alhambra in Granada. But as I learned more, my ideas shifted. I traveled to Egypt, and to the Middle East many times.I found the most wonderful examples of Islamic work in Cairo, it turns out. I'd visited mosques there before, but I didn't see them with the same eye as I did this time. They truly said something to me about Islamic architecture.

I.M. Pei

We had never eaten our own chickens but we delighted in eating their eggs. No matter how hot the summer became, they always presented us with eggs, which I thought was very generous of them, considering the heat. I'm sure I wouldn't have bothered.

It's very kind of you to take us in," said the vicar, smiling. "We're so sorry if we've put you out at all." "Not at all!" I said, lying through my teeth.

The vicar's handshake was warm and reassuring, but shaking hands with Mavis was like clutching a bunch of dead twigs.

My object is merely to give the reader a general introduction into an abode where, if so disposed, he may linger and loiter with me day by day until we gradually become familiar with all its localities.

Washington Irving

To Judaism Christians ascribe the glory of having been the first religion to teach a pure monotheism. But monotheism existed long before the Jews attained to it. Zoroaster and his earliest followers were monotheists, dualism being a later development of the Persian theology. The adoption of monotheism by the Jews, which occurred only at a very late period in their history, was not, however, the result of a divine revelation, or even of an intellectual superiority, for the Jews were immeasurably inferior intellectually to the Greeks and Romans, to the Hindus and Egyptians, and to the Assyrians and Babylonians, who are supposed to have retained a belief in polytheism. This monotheism of the Jews has chiefly the result of a religious intolerance never before equaled and never since surpassed, except in the history of Christianity and Mohammedanism, the daughters of Judaism. Jehovistic priests and kings tolerated no rivals of their god and made death the penalty for disloyalty to him. The Jewish nation became monotheistic for the same reason that Spain, in the clutches of the Inquisition, became entirely Christian.

John E. Remsburg

Spanish rain,A maiden’s dress,Apothecary pillsAnd ancient thrills;Melancholy killsA girl’s caress.(—Roman Payne; Valencia, Spain, November 2nd 2012)

Having confronted the world with little except a battered typewriter and a certain resilience, he can now take posthumous credit for having got the three great questions of the 20th century essentially 'right.' Orwell was an early and consistent foe of European imperialism, and foresaw the end of colonial rule. He was one of the first to volunteer to bear arms against fascism and Nazism in Spain. And, while he was soldiering in Catalonia, he saw through the biggest and most seductive lie of them all—the false promise of a radiant future offered by the intellectual underlings of Stalinism.

Christopher Hitchens

Nature and man are opposed in Spain.