"The true history of mankind will be written only when Albanians participate in it's writing."
- Maximilian Lambertz
"The ethnic Albanian population traces its roots to the pre-Hellenic Illyrian tribes, whose presence has been recorded in the Balkans since at least the second millennium B.C.E."
Eastern Europe: an introduction to the people, lands, and culture. Richard C. Frucht -- 2005 Page 698
"The Albanians in general have a fine cast of countenance; and the most beautiful women I have ever beheld, in stature and in features"
- Lord Byron
"The men have splendid skulls, lefty broad brows and small delicately molded features. The women are the most beautiful in Eastern Europe. The children are lovely. One cannot be long among the Albanians before perceiving that they are evidently of a noble and ancient race, to which the Montenegrin and other Slavs races will bear no compare."
Albania: a narrative of recent travel By Edward Frederick Knight
Balkan Background, Bernard Newman, 2007, p.231: "Albania is the youngest country of the Balkans, but its people are the oldest.
"European diplomacy intervened and asked the commission to draw the boundary not on the basis of their investigation and study but on the basis of a compromise, which the great powers arrived at to suit their own affairs. By this compromise the districts of Kortcha, Koloma, Permete, and Arghirokastra with all its valley, were included within the boundaries of independent Albania, while Konitza, the district of Pindus, Janina, the capital of southern Albania, and the whole Province of Chameria, almost exclusively inhabited by Albanians of the Moslem creed, was given to Greece. Thus, the representatives of the great powers, faithful disciples of the old school diplomacy, ignored the rights of the people and drew an Albania on the map, which shut the Albanians in the narrow mountains, the most ancient race of Europe being forced to yield towns and low lands to the Serbians and the Greeks and starve on the ridge of sterile crags."
- Wadham Peackock
"In the list of heroes, John Hunyadi and Scanderbeg are commonly associated and entitled to our notice since their occupation of arms delayed the ruin of the Greek (Byzantine) Empire. ..... The Albanian prince may justly be praised as a firm and able champion of his national independence. The enthusiasm of chivalry and religion has ranked him with the names of Alexander the Great and Pyrrhus. .....''
- Historian Edmond Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
"Moslem's although are not very strict about their religion, and have a tolerance for the Christians, as the Christians have for them, that is not found elsewhere-certainly not in the Near East. One will find the Christians using a prayer rug, and Moslem's observing Roman Catholic feast days. But the Albanian is first of all an Albanian and no religion interferes with his own standard of right and wrong."
-Lands and Peoples: "The World in Color" Greece-Albania-Balkans, 1940, page 53
They are strewn with the wreckage of dead Empires, past Powers, only the Albanian goes on for ever. - Edith Durham
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