Quotes by Dutch authors

See the complete list of authors from Netherland

"In intelligence work, there are limits to the amount of information one can share. Confidentiality is essential"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"We have an integrated picture of the threat from outside and from within that is provided not only to our foreign ministers but also to our justice and interior ministers"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"There is a series of sectors which could be severely disrupted by terrorist attacks, particularly if they were to happen in several member states simultaneously"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"Terrorists always have the advantage of surprise"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"It's important that we work very closely with moderate Muslim forces locally, nationally and internationally"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"If information ends up in the wrong hands, the lives of people very often are immediately at risk"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"I love to smile"

Inge de Bruijn, Athlete

"I always think it's because of you know hard work, hard training. And if Susie's training hard, you know, why can't I train hard to get a world record. I'm doing the same thing"

Inge de Bruijn, Athlete

"The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"Not many architects have the luxury to reject significant things"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"Each building has to be beautiful, but cheap and fast, but it lasts forever. That is already an incredible battery of seemingly contradictory demands. So yes, I'm definitely perhaps contradictory person, but I operate in very contradictory times"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"It is not possible to live in this age if you don't have a sense of many contradictory forces"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"I'd say that my profession ends where architectural thinking ends - architectural thinking in terms of thinking about programs and organizational structure. These abstractions play a role in many other disciplines, and those disciplines are now defining their 'architectures' as well"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"Our office acts like a kind of educational establishment and we are very careful who we educate"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"Influence is a very unpleasant subject and I deal with it in a maybe irresponsible way, which is to really ignore it. It would be a nightmare if we started to really think about it; it would tie our hands, it would tie everyone else's hands"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build a shoebox"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"Prada is extremely directed in terms of communicating what they like and what they don't like. That is actually extremely pleasant because it clarifies very easily what you can do and what you need to do"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"When air conditioning, escalators, and advertising appeared, shopping expanded its scale, but also limited its spontaneity. And it became much more predictable, almost scientific. What had once been the most surprising became the most manipulated"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"One of our theories is that one can offset this excessive compulsion toward the spectacular with a return to simplicity"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"We felt it was very important for an entity like CCTV to make its presence felt... To generate a space and to define a space, that is the main thing"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"Designs are increasingly winning competitions because they are literally green, and because somewhere they feature a small windmill"

Rem Koolhaas, Architect

"We remain vulnerable. There is no such thing as 100 percent security against terrorism"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"Ultimately, freedom and democracy are stronger than fear and tyranny"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"Indiscriminate attacks on civilians ought, under all circumstances, to be illegal in war as in peacetime"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"Europe has a long and tragic history of mostly domestic terrorism"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"I remain optimistic. What we've seen in Europe and the rest of the world is that freedom has a much stronger attraction than radical fundamentalism"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"I have never come across a technology that doesn't change. This is inevitable. You have to adapt your systems as technology develops"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"The majority of the world's Muslims do not believe that terrorism is a legitimate strategy or that Islam is incompatible with democracy"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"Terrorists have failed to trigger mass conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe. We should draw strength from that fact"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"Police forces collect information to be used in a public court to get people convicted. Security services gather information that does not necessarily lead to people being prosecuted and in many cases needs to remain confidential"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"Look at Iraq; look at Afghanistan, where at great personal physical risk people have gone to the polls and have rejected the appeal from Bin Laden and his allies to stay at home"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"The European Borders Agency in Warsaw has been created to help border forces in Europe cooperate more"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"In situations of military conflict, civil strife, lawlessness, bad governance, and human rights violations, terrorists find it easier to hide, train and prepare their attacks"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

"We still lack a global definition of terrorism"

Gijs de Vries, Politician

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