Frans Timmermans Quotes
If nationalism makes us poor, weak, and morally insecure, how can it claim to be patriotic? I maintain that nationalists are unpatriotic.
Timmermans, Frans. "Speech at the Bucerius Summer School." European Commission, 24 Aug. 2017.
His wife also had a Doctorate in Chemistry—the 2nd woman to achieve that in Germany—and she was distraught that he had been the leading scientist developing not only the poison gas which the Germans introduced in WWI, but he also developed the tactics of use and personally went to the battlefield and supervised the first major gas attacks. This was much against the ethical value of most scientists and Jewish ethics in particular. Haber had been a close colleague of Albert Einstein and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and while Einstein was trying to get scientists to sign a petition against the war, Haber was developing the first weapon of mass destruction. After Haber gave this response to his wife, we left to go to the front to supervise another major gas attack. His wife committed suicide. Haber, while a German national hero to militaristic Germany, never again had the kind of pre-war relationship that existed with Einstein and many other fellow scientists.
The President was commenting on the USS Vincennes which had accidently shot down an Iran Civilian Air Flight flying in a commercial air corridor two months before. 290 innocent civilians were killed. This quotation illustrates a puzzling aspect of U. S. politics. Somehow if an American politician, especially a President, apologizes for something the country did, a substantial proportion, albeit a minority, of the nation feels that the apology somehow shows weakness and affects national security even if we made a horrendous mistake as we did in this case. Many Americans and foreigners see this as arrogant, unfair, and unfeeling. No one knows whether Bush was pandering to his right wing who oppose all U.S. apologies or he really believed that regardless of what we may have done, we should never apologize.
Franciscus Cornelis Gerardus Maria Timmermans is a Dutch politician and diplomat serving as First Vice President of the European Commission since 2014, and has served in the von der Leyen Commission as Executive Vice President of the European Commission for the European Green Deal and European Commissioner for Climate Action since 2019.
