41 Quotes by Yugoslavian authors

Voices from the former Yugoslavia carry a grainy warmth: mordant humor beside tender gravity, daily coffee steamed with sevdah and a pinch of inat. Sayings tread mountain paths and city tramlines, weighing honor, neighborly duty, and the stubborn hope that survives bura and gunpowder. From kafana wisdom to monkish whispers, bridges and borders reappear, crossed, questioned, rebuilt. The cadence swings like a kolo, or drones like gusle: solidarity without sentimentality, memory without sanctimony, rakija toasts that sting, then soothe. Love, work, fate, spoken plain, yet echoing long.

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"We are not angels. Nor are we the devils you have made us out to be"

Slobodan Milosevic, Criminal

"Yugoslavia is a multinational community and it can survive only under the conditions of full equality for all nations that live in it"

Slobodan Milosevic, Criminal

"It should be clear to all, after the past ten years, that NATO isn't attacking Serbia because of Milosevic; it is attacking Milosevic because of Serbia"

Slobodan Milosevic, Criminal

"The loss of national identity is the greatest defeat a nation can know, and it is inevitable under the contemporary form of colonization"

Slobodan Milosevic, Criminal

"When I am not desperate, I am worthless"

Ivo Andric, Writer

"Lands of great discoveries are also lands of great injustices"

Ivo Andric, Writer

"Life may be not only meaningless but absurd"

Thomas Nagel, Philosopher

"We have no quarrel with America. We all know NATO is the strongest military machine in the world. We simply want them to stop being so busy with our country and worry about their own problems"

Slobodan Milosevic, Criminal

"Equality means nothing unless incorporated into the institutions"

Slobodan Milosevic, Criminal

"At the time when this famous historical battle was fought in Kosovo, the people were looking at the stars, expecting aid from them. Now, six centuries later, they are looking at the stars again, waiting to conquer them"

Slobodan Milosevic, Criminal

"It is the utmost necessity that this congress be a congress of unity"

Slobodan Milosevic, Criminal

"For as long as multinational communities have existed, their weak point has always been the relations between different nations"

Slobodan Milosevic, Criminal

"Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language"

Slobodan Milosevic, Criminal

"The only differences one can and should allow in socialism are between hard working people and idlers and between honest people and dishonest people"

Slobodan Milosevic, Criminal

"NATO believes it can pick on a small nation and force us to surrender our independence. And that is where NATO miscalculated. You are not willing to sacrifice lives to achieve our surrender. But we are willing to die to defend our rights as an independent sovereign nation"

Slobodan Milosevic, Criminal

"It is difficult to say today whether the Battle of Kosovo was a defeat or a victory for the Serbian people, whether thanks to it we fell into slavery or we survived in this slavery"

Slobodan Milosevic, Criminal

"Equal and united people can above all become a part of the civilization toward which mankind is moving. If we cannot be at the head of the column leading to such a civilization, there is certainly no need for us to be at is tail"

Slobodan Milosevic, Criminal

"The truth can not be drowned by any flood of false indictments"

Slobodan Milosevic, Criminal

"There is no rule without revolts and conspiracies, even as there is no property without work and worry"

Ivo Andric, Writer

"One shouldn't be afraid of the humans. Well, I am not afraid of the humans, but of what is inhuman in them"

Ivo Andric, Writer

"Sadness is also a kind of defence"

Ivo Andric, Writer

"If people would know how little brain is ruling the world, they would die of fear"

Ivo Andric, Writer

"Between the fear that something would happen and the hope that still it wouldn't, there is much more space than one thinks. On that narrow, hard, bare and dark space a lot of us spend their lives"

Ivo Andric, Writer

"What can and doesn't have to be always, at the end, surrenders to something that has to be"

Ivo Andric, Writer

"Searching for what I need, and I don't even know precisely what that is, I was going from a man to a man, and I saw that all of them together have less than me who has nothing, and that I left to each of them a bit of that what I don't have and I've been searching for"

Ivo Andric, Writer

"Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable"

Thomas Nagel, Philosopher

"Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time"

Thomas Nagel, Philosopher

"There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality"

Thomas Nagel, Philosopher

"That's the key to success, isn't it? It has to be fun"

Monica Seles, Athlete

"I never really did Christmas before. Christmas Day? I mean - what's that? What's it all about? I was always flying on Christmas Day"

Monica Seles, Athlete

"I have this terrible dark side to my personality, which playing tennis keeps at bay"

Monica Seles, Athlete

"People think I must have been so talented at an early age, but I don't know - was it talent or hard work? Who knows?"

Monica Seles, Athlete

"It doesn't matter who is playing or how old they are. I just worry about what I can control. It doesn't give me more or less motivation"

Monica Seles, Athlete

"Tennis is so competitive. I guess that's the way it has to be"

Monica Seles, Athlete

"Did you know that Christmas Day is absolutely the best day to fly? It is. No crowded airports and crowded planes. I always flew to Australia. That's what Christmas was for me - a plane journey to the next tournament"

Monica Seles, Athlete

"You will never have great tennis champions from England because of the cold and dark, but most of all because people only care about the sport for two weeks a year, and then they're on to something else. There's just not a great love of the sport there"

Monica Seles, Athlete

"You have to want to play it all day, every day to get to the top"

Monica Seles, Athlete

"Tennis has to become everything to you if you're going to make it to the top. You have to live it"

Monica Seles, Athlete

"Madonna has total control over her life, and not many women have that"

Monica Seles, Athlete

"I used to pretend that I was Tom attacking Jerry, who was drawn on the ball"

Monica Seles, Athlete

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