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.

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

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

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.

No country in Europe has a larger proportion of men and women of immigrant descent, mainly from the African continent and mainly Muslim: an estimated six to seven million of them, or more than 10% of the population.

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

That said, the question remains: how to strike the balance between free speech and mutual respect in this mixed-up world, both blessed and cursed with instant communication? We should not fight fire with fire, threats with threats.

A central claim of the Bush administration's foreign policy is that the spread of democracy in the Middle East is the cure for terrorism.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

To be in Florence is to reflect on Europes intricate diversity and its lost creativity.

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.

Obsession is an attractive thing. People who are really, really interested and good at one thing and smart are attractive, if they're men.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass, for new things to happen to us, we want to hold on to certain moments, we don't want our lives to end.

I do not think that obsession is funny or that not being able to stop one's intensity is funny.

Obsessional does not necessarily mean sexual obsession, not even obsession for this, or for that in particular; to be an obsessional means to find oneself caught in a mechanism, in a trap increasingly demanding and endless.

In America, sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it's a fact.

I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

I'm a guy who just wanted to see his name in the lineup everyday. To me, baseball was a passion to the point of obsession.

The obsession required to see a feature through from concept to release is not a rational thing to do with your brief time on this planet. Nor is it something to which an intelligent person should aspire.

As much as I transferred my mother to Elizabeth Shore of The Black Dahlia, as much as her dad mutated into an obsession with crime in general, well, I have thought about other things throughout the years.

People have this obsession. They want you to be like you were in 1969. They want you to, because otherwise their youth goes with you. It's very selfish, but it's understandable.

Zac Efron is my obsession, we're the same person. We're not actually here, it's like Janet and Michael Jackson. He just puts on his wig and a dress, and it's me, and you don't know that. It's one of the greatest mysteries of all time.

My hope is that people will be repulsed by the character's complete lack of ethics and obsession with consumerism - that's what I was saying about the difference between the character's message and the film's message.

Love is an obsession. It has that quality to it. But there are healthy obsessions, and mine is one of them.

I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth; religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.

The trade of authorship is a violent, and indestructible obsession.

What can we say about a marketing culture that so openly feeds and colludes with obsession? The Disney empire has developed this to an unprecedented degree of professionalism.

The obsession with performance left no room for the development of the intuitive or spiritual impact of space and form other than the aesthetic of the machine itself.

Obsession led me to write. It's been that way with every book I've ever written. I become completely consumed by a theme, by characters, by a desire to meet a challenge.

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.

Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an after-life.

Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.

I have never appreciated a quiet moment with a friend as much, a quiet moment with a book and I think part of that is my obsession with being older and time going faster and it's become increasingly sweeter for me.

The discussion of ideas as opposed to the American narcissistic obsession with what's going on with the self, that's the general thing people are talking about.

The more decadent a culture gets, the more they have a need for what they don't have at all, which is innocence, so you end up with kiddie porn and a perverse obsession with youth.

Dancing is my obsession. My life.

Music became an obsession, and eventually we felt more comfortable with each other then we did with anyone else. The three of us were like one person.

Yes and our obsession with youth in our culture and how we, women lie about their age after 35 obsessively and no one wants to let anyone know they're getting older, et cetera.

The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.

The painter's obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work.

Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? Is it a legacy of our colonial years? We want foreign television sets. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported?

It creeps up on you and becomes an obsession. It comes out of watching a million movies.

Time, in general, has always been a central obsession of mine - what it does to people, how it can constitute a plot all on its own. So naturally, I am interested in old age.