I urge everyone to be patient and reasonable and I warn against shooting from the hip in the truest sense of the term. Pressure and dialogue are needed.

There is a proposal to divide the currency zone into a north and a south euro. There is also the idea of setting up a core monetary union in the middle of Europe. I disapprove of these debates. Instead, we should devote all of our efforts to supplementing the monetary union with a political union.

We must go back to teach Europeans to love Europe.

The European Union has decades of experience in overcoming crises and has always emerged stronger after.

If someone complains about Europe from Monday to Saturday then nobody is going to believe him on Sunday when he says he is a convinced European.

It is not acceptable that European Union countries are divided into those who give and those who take.

I have always considered it to be a minor miracle that after the war, people in Europe's border regions were able to forget everything and, in accordance with the slogan "Never Again War," develop a program that still works today.