"The Albanian is prudent, dexterous, and active in all the ordinary relations of life, in all the combinations and affairs which do not exceed his intelligence; he is faithful, sure and persevering in the service of him who has known how to recognize his attachment, and that in a manner which surpasses belief; but he is deep, cunning, dissimulating and cruel as a tiger towards his enemies.
These traits seem to me the most national and the most universal in respect to the character and physiognomy of this people in general. What can be done with them, particularly in war, has in our days been put in dreadful evidence by Ali Pacha, the most perfect model of the Albanian that ever existed, and, if I may so express it, the flower of Albanism"
Peter Oluf Brønsted
- - - Aktualisiert - - -
"Between the Albanian and the Slav there stand centuries of hatred and blood feud. The Albanian regards the Slav as an intruder and a robber; the Slav looks on the Albanian as an inconvenient person who, though occasionally beaten, has always refused to be conquered; and, having the inestimable advantage of being more skilled in literature, he has consistently represented the voiceless Albanian as a brigand and a plunderer of Slav villages. As a matter of history, the boot is on the other foot. Setting aside the fact that both Albanian and Slav can be, and are, brigands on occasion, the Albanian and his kindred had been for centuries quarrelling comfortably among themselves when the Slav hordes poured across the Danube, and drove the old inhabitants by sheer weight of numbers from the plains to the uplands, and from the uplands to the mountains ...
In every town and district which the Slavs can claim by right of conquest under some nebulous and transitory Empire, the Albanians can oppose the title of original ownership of the soil from ages when neither history nor the Slavs were known in the Balkans"
Wadham Peacock
- - - Aktualisiert - - -
"The Albanian makes a splandid soldier,but he complicates the work of government by calmly observing:"No,we do not pay taxes.We are Albanian,and do not like to""
Levett, Ada Elizabeth
- - - Aktualisiert - - -
“Albania is the youngest country of the Balkans, but its people are the oldest. They are probably the descendants of the ancient. Thracians and Illyrians; their language, despite infusions of words from neibhbouring races, is quite unlike any other Balkan tongue. At one time they occupied the whole of the Southern Balkans, and were a vigorous and dynamic people: Alexander the Great is claimed to have been of Albanian origin. Gradually they were encompassed in their present home, much as the Basques were crowded into their Biscayan corner, by the tribes surging from the east; or as the remnants of the British tribes were pushed westwards into the mountains of Wales”
Bernard Newman
- - - Aktualisiert - - -
"No portion of European Turkey has been more visited than Albania by men of sense and science"
John Reynell Morell
- - - Aktualisiert - - -
"The Albanians, who, apparently are a tribe of former Illyrians, are strong warriors; they were the soldiers of Achilles, Pyrrhus and Iskender Bey have retained their reputation"
Auguste Racinet
- - - Aktualisiert - - -
"They are strewn with the wreckage of dead Empires – past Powers – only the Albanian "goes on for ever""
Edith Durham
- - - Aktualisiert - - -
"The Albanians are generally considered to be the most ancient ethnic group in Southeastern Europe. They are the descendants of pre-Hellenic stock that was pushed back into the mountains of the western Balkans by the Hellenes and the Slavs. In this respect the Albanians may be compared to the Celts of the British Isles who were forced into the mountains of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland by the Anglo-Saxon invaders. The Albanian language is organically distinct from the neighboring Slavic and Greek languages in the same manner that the Celtic language is different from the Germanic".
Leften Stavros Stavrianos,Traian Stoianovich
- - - Aktualisiert - - -
“Just as we are not and do not want to be Turks, so we shall oppose with all our might anyone who would like to turn us into Slavs or Austrians or Greeks. We want to be Albanians.”
League of Prizren