Carlo Azeglio Ciampi Quotes

Europe is and will be a Union of States.

Our task is nothing less than the creation of a new constitutional order for a new united Europe.

I completely agree with Helmut Kohl. I am not an advocate of the "United States of Europe," nor am I an integration fanatic.

I am going to leave the future of Europe to the Europeans.

I'm against the European Union, but I am very much in favor of Europe.

The euro is our common fate, and Europe is our common future.

After choosing monetary union, further political union and workable governance in Europe was always going to be necessary.

This much is true: When we created the euro, it wasn't possible to create a political union along with it. People weren't ready for that. But since then, they've grown more willing to go in that direction. It's a process, one that is sometimes laborious and sometimes slow. But it's important to keep the populations involved.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schaeuble, her finance minister, are right to oppose fiscal and bank unions without political union.

Without Britain, Europe would remain only a torso.

Indeed, the creators of the euro envisioned it as an instrument to promote political union.

The euro currency both presupposes and promotes a fiction - that 'Europe' has somehow become, against the wishes of most Europeans, a political rather than a merely geographic expression.

I see us very much at the heart of Europe. We are founding members of the single market; we are founding members of the euro.

The emergence of a unified Europe is one of the most revolutionary events of our time.

It is always said that Europe is a project of the elite. That's incorrect.

Thanks to the euro, our pockets will soon hold solid evidence of a European identity. We need to build on this, and make the euro more than a currency and Europe more than a territory... In the next six months, we will talk a lot about political union, and rightly so. Political union is inseparable from economic union. Stronger growth and Euorpean integration are related issues. In both areas we will take concrete steps forward.

We have to give ourselves a constitution which marks the birth of Europe as a political entity.

The euro is a sickly premature infant, the result of an over-hasty monetary union.

For me, Europe consists of three things: sovereignty, unity and democracy.

I am a committed European; a united Europe is Romania's future.

If the euro becomes a factor promoting Europe's drifting apart, then the foundation of the European project is destroyed.

I'm a great supporter of the European Union. I didn't support entry to the Euro, not because I'm against it in principle but because I didn't think it was economically right for Britain. But that doesn't make me any less pro-European.

I declare myself an Austrian and a European. A united Europe will be a peaceful Europe.

Europe has a lot of strength. We need to pool that strength, and I am very much in favour of that - more of a deeper political union.

There is not, in my view, a single European demos.