I am strictly against a European superstate.

If we allow Catalonia - and it is none of our business - to separate, others will do the same. I do not want that.

We shouldn't persuade people that we can simply conjure up the sun and the moon: at the most, we can deliver a telescope.

Europe has to be about more than market, goods, and money.

However painful or regrettable Brexit may be, it will not stop the E.U. as it moves to the future; we need to move forward.

The European family may well be anything but perfect. But it is the best thing that we have for bringing the countries of Europe around the same table and for forging compromises so that people here can live in peace, freedom, and prosperity.

I am against nationalists, but I am very much in favour of patriots.

This was a continent of divisions, of wars, of conflicts, of divergences, differences... When I am in Asia, in Africa, people admire what we have managed to do. Europe is beautiful seen from other continents.

As complicated and complex and as difficult as we are, the unity of Europe is a pre-condition for a better organized world, and if the European Union would fail or decompose, or other members left, the U.S. would have a more difficult role to play in the world.

Europe must not distance itself from Africa's universal ambitions.