Timothy Garton Ash quotes

Timothy Garton Ash is a British historian, author, and commentator specializing in European affairs. His work explores the history of contemporary Europe, with a focus on freedom and democracy. He has significantly influenced debates on European integration and the role of free speech in society. Here are 24 of his quotes:

The key to the survival of liberty in the modern world is the embrace of multiple identities.

Timothy Garton Ash

One thing, however, I know with certainty: violence, or the direct threat of violence, of the kind we have seen in the past few days, is totally unjustified as a response to any published word or image.

Timothy Garton Ash

Developments in information technology and globalised media mean that the most powerful military in the history of the world can lose a war, not on the battlefield of dust and blood, but on the battlefield of world opinion.

Timothy Garton Ash

After saying yes to Turkey, the EU is having difficulty finding clear and consistent grounds for saying no to other, still more remote candidates - but being in the general vicinity of Europe does seem to be a continuing requirement.

Timothy Garton Ash

I have also been saddened, though hardly surprised, by the weakness of the EU's reaction to the criminal attack on the Danish embassy in Syria, which seems to have been permitted, if not actively encouraged, by the Syrian regime.

Timothy Garton Ash

To be in Florence is to reflect on Europe's intricate diversity - and its lost creativity.

Timothy Garton Ash

Putin must be stopped. And sometimes only guns can stop guns.

Timothy Garton Ash

But transitions from the politics of violence to democratic compromise are always messy.

Timothy Garton Ash

Canadians tend to be a bit more religious than most Europeans - though not more than the Poles or Ukrainians. Most important, their attitude to immigration and ethnic minorities is more positive than that of most Europeans.

Timothy Garton Ash

Nuclear proliferation - the proliferation of WMDs altogether - is one of the greatest dangers of our time.

Timothy Garton Ash

Yet another thing Canadians and Europeans have in common is an obsession with the United States, and with distinguishing themselves from it, often by crude stereotyping.

Timothy Garton Ash

I love this country, but the union jack leaves me cold.

Timothy Garton Ash

Europe is a woman, now middle-aged, who has already had a number of heart attacks and is currently experiencing the biggest health crisis of her life, but one that need not be fatal.

Timothy Garton Ash

There is already a generation of European graduates who feel they have been robbed of the better future they were led to expect. They are members of a new class: the precariat.

Timothy Garton Ash

Well, that's the way democracy works. We have to build this Europe with the material we have at our disposal. And this material is national democracy.

Timothy Garton Ash

Every step that produces a single job for a currently unemployed European should be taken. Every centimetre of red tape that puts someone out of work must be torn up.

Timothy Garton Ash

Europe's biggest problem is its success.

Timothy Garton Ash

Russia has lost an empire but not yet found a role. Russia has to decide what it wants to be. And as we know in Britain, that takes some time. It is quite tough to lose an empire and Russia lost its empire very rapidly and very admirably, that is to say peacefully, it didn't fight.

Timothy Garton Ash

America is divided by a great argument about itself. Europe is divided by a great argument about America.

Timothy Garton Ash

Except for its worst inner-city slums, America is not the primitive capitalist jungle of European imagination, where human beings slink away like wounded animals to die in bloodstained holes.

Timothy Garton Ash

I have a dreadful feeling in my bones that future historians may write of the May 2014 elections: "This was the wake-up call from which Europe failed to wake up."

Timothy Garton Ash