The EU project explained

"Europe's nations should be guided towards the superstate without their peoples understanding what is happening... This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation."

Jean Monnet (One of the founding fathers of the EU) in a letter to a friend on 30 April 1952.

"Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly... All the earlier proposals will be in a new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way...What was [already] difficult to understand will become utterly incomprehensible, but the substance has been retained."

Giscard D'Estaing, President of the Convention on the Future of Europe which drafted the EU Constitution.

"The time for individual nations [in Europe] having their own tax, employment and social policies is definitely over. We must finally bury the erroneous ideas of nations having sovereignty over foreign and defence policies. National sovereignty will soon prove itself to be a product of the imagination,"

Gerhard Schröder, Chancellor of Germany, January 1999.

"In ten years 80% of laws on the economy and social policy will be passed at the European and not the national level. We are not going to manage to take all the decisions needed between now and 1995 unless we see the beginnings of a European Government"

– Jacques Delors Commission President 1988.

"We want European Union, the United States of Europe"

– Helmut Kohl, German Chancellor 1989.

"Creating a single European state bound by one European Constitution is the decisive task of our time"

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, The Daily Telegraph, 27 December 1998.

"This Constitution is, in spite of all justified calls for further regulations, a milestone. Yes, it is more than that. The EU Constitution is the birth certificate of the United States of Europe. The Constitution is not the end point of integration, but the framework for - as it says in the preamble - an ever closer union,"

Hans Martin Bury, the German Minister for Europe, debate in the Bundestag, Die Welt, 25 February 2005.

"For the first time, Europe has a shared Constitution. This pact is the point of no return. Europe is becoming an irreversible project, irrevocable after the ratification of this treaty. It is a new era for Europe, a new geography, a new history"

French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Le Metro, 7th October 2004.

"The Constitution is the capstone of a European Federal State."

Guy Verhofstadt, Belgian Prime Minister, Financial Times, 21st June 2004.

"Our constitution cannot be reduced to a mere treaty for co-operation between governments. Anyone who has not yet grasped this fact deserves to wear the dunce's cap"

- Valéry Giscard, President of the EU Convention, speech in Aachen accepting the Charlemagne Prize for European integration, 29th May 2003.

"Anyone in Britain who claims the constitution will not change things is trying to sweeten the pill for those who don't want to see a bigger role for Europe. The constitution is not just an intellectual exercise. It will quickly change people's lives,"

former Italian Prime Minister Lamberto Dini, The Sunday Telegraph, 1st June 2003.

"Through the consolidation of basic production and the institution of a new High Authority, whose decisions will bind France, Germany and the other countries that join, this proposal represents the first concrete step towards a European federation, imperative for the preservation of peace."

Robert Schuman May wrote in 1950

"We need a European defence, a European army, not just on paper but a force genuinely capable of operating in the field, including beyond the European borders… I am advocating a more powerful Europe… In short I am advocating a United States of Europe".

Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt - speech at London School of Economics, March 21, 2006

"Most people don't know what has been decided,we continue step by step until there is no turning back".

Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker, The Economist, September 24, 2004

"The difference between the original Constitution and the present Lisbon Treaty is one of approach, rather than content."

Giscard D'Estaing, The Independent (London) October 30, 2007.

"The point of the exercise was to achieve the same changes to the EU that the rejected EU constitution proposed, but to do this by way of a new treaty amending previous treaties and in ways that only a few legal eagles could possibly understand."

Vincent Browne, The Irish Times, March 5, 2008

"The agenda must and will continue. Globalization is not something China imposed on us, but something we have done ourselves. People must be told that globalization is our policy. . . I see a clear danger when people are saying less Europe is better. More integration is not the problem, it is the solution."

- EU Commission Vice-President Günter Verheugen, International Herald Tribune, 8 June 2005

"We know that nine out of 10 people will not have read the Constitution and will vote on the basis of what politicians and journalists say. More than that, if the answer is No, the vote will probably have to be done again, because it absolutely has to be Yes."

- Jean-Luc Dehaene, Former Belgian Prime Minister and Vice-President of the EU Convention, Irish Times, 2 June 2004

"It (the introduction of the euro) is not economic at all. It is a completely political step - The historical significance of the euro is to constuct a bipolar economy in the world. The two poles are the dollar and the euro. This is the political meaning of the single European currency. It is a step beyond which there will be others. The euro is just an antipasto."

- Commission President Romano Prodi, interview on CNN, 1 January 2002

"Federalism might make eurosceptics laugh but, with the creation of the euro,the halfway stage would be reached. Four key organisms would have a federal or quasi-federal status: the Central Bank, the Court of Justice, the Commission and the Parliament. Only one institution is missing: a federal government."

- M.Jacques Lang, Foreign Affairs Spokesman, French National Assembly, The Guardian, London, 22 July 1997

"The fusion (of economic functions) would compel nations to fuse their sovereignty into that of a single European State."

- Jean Monnet, founder of the European Movement, 3 April 1952
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Thanks to Speak Out, No 2 Lisbon, Free Europe and others for the quotations.