Daniel Banco

“As the Arab proverb says, “People resemble their times more than they resemble their fathers.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond

“Romania, as I am forced to refer to it, constitutes one of those indigestible ethnic nations, like Georgia and Armenia, that have miraculously survived the millennia despite being oppressed, overrun, and vanquished.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond

“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

“Like serious reading itself, real travel has now become an act of resistance against the distractions of the electronic age, and against all the worries that weigh us down, thanks to that age. A good book deserves to be finished, just as a haunting landscape tempts further experience of it, and further research into it. Travel and serious reading, because they demand sustained focus, stand athwart the nonexistent attention spans that deface our current time on Earth.22”
― Robert D. Kaplan, In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond