A

• Wee may say of him, as of the Spaniard, Hee is a bad Servant, but a worse Maister.
  • Thomas Adams, The Sacrifice of Thankefulnesse (London: C. Knight, 1616) p. 6.

B

• The French are wiser than they seem, and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are.
  • Francis Bacon, "Of Seeming Wise", in Essays (1625); Brian Vickers (ed.) The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) p. 389.

• And towering above each town, generally built on a height commanding it, stood the church, its finger pointed to heaven, its masonry rich and heavy, permanent and menacing, a constant reminder of the domination of the Church down all the ages. For although this deeply Catholic people had been burning their churches for centuries, the Church and its allies had always reasserted their power over the people, and this power was in dispute again to the endless hills, carved from root to summit with stone-shored terraces to hold the olives and the vine fields, quiet evidence of thousands upon thousands of grinding hours of man and woman labor. Sunny Spain, land of mañana, where nothing was done today that could be put off till tomorrow!
  • Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain (1939), p. 41

• The Spaniard is inherently nationalistic; but no more so than other national groups. Most people, trained from birth to distrust the foreigner, are nationalistic.
  • Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of American in Spain (1939), p. 153

• There was always, therefore, a certain amount of friction between the Americans and the Spanish, which would seem to be a paradox when you consider that these Americans had abandoned everything in life to come to the assistance of the Spanish people. But a small, persisting snobbism on the part of the Americans, and a residue of distrust on the part of the Spanish (few clearly understood the issues at stake), contributed to the persistence of this friction. (Franco's propaganda also helped.)
  • Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of American in Spain (1939), p. 154

• Cervantes smil'd Spain's chivalry away.
  • Lord Byron, Don Juan, canto xiii (1823), stanza 11.
• The institutions that had flourished under the Moslem, died when the Moslem departed; and after four centuries of light and learning, Andalusia (Muslim Spain) fell back, under the Christian rule, into a condition of ignorance and barbarism, nearly, if not quite, equal to that of the north western provinces of the peninsula.
  • Ulick Burke, History of Spain. p: 288

C

• The genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, speaking on April 23, 1832; Henry Nelson Coleridge (ed.) Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1905) p. 171.

• In Mexico the gods ruled, the priests interpreted and interposed, and the people obeyed. In Spain, the priests ruled, the king interpreted and interposed, and the gods obeyed. A nuance in an ideological difference is a wide chasm.
  • Richard Condon A Talent for Loving (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961) p. 5

H

• Fair land! of chivalry the old domain,
  Land of the vine and olive, lovely Spain!
  Though not for thee with classic shores to vie
  In charms that fix th' enthusiast's pensive eye;
  Yet hast thou scenes of beauty richly fraught
  With all that wakes the glow of lofty thought.
  • Felicia Hemans, Abencerrage, Canto II, line 1, reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 740.

• Ortega y Gasset is of the opinion that the inability of a country to produce a genuine mass movement indicates some ethnological defect. He says of his own Spain that its "ethnological intelligence has always been an atrophied function and has never had a normal development."
  • Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951) Ch.18 Good and Bad Mass Movements, §125 citing Ortega y Gasset's The Modern Theme (1931)

J

• With respect to modern languages, French, as I have before observed, is indispensible. Next to this the Spanish is most important to an American. Our connection with Spain is already important and will become daily more so. Besides this the antient part of American history is written chiefly in Spanish.
  • Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Thomas Mann Randolph (6 July 1787).

M

• The European Union and many of its countries, which used to take initiatives in the United Nations for peaceful settlements of conflict, are now one of the most important war assets of the U.S./NATO front. Many countries have also been drawn into complicity in breaking international law through U.S./U.K./NATO wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and so on.
  • Mairead Maguire in The Disturbing Expansion of the Military-Industrial Complex, Common Dreams, (14 October 2014)

V

• En dos edades vivimos
  los propios y los ajenos:
  la de plata los estraños,
  y la de cobre los nuestros.
  • English translation: 'We live in different ages, non-Spaniards and ourselves: they in the age of silver, we in the age of brass'.
  • Lope de Vega, La Dorotea Act I, sc. iv. Translation from Alan S. Trueblood and Edwin Honig (ed. and trans.) La Dorotea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985) p. 23.