Quotes About Poland

Puszcza, an old Polish word, means "forest primeval." Straddling the border between Poland and Belarus, the half-million acres of the Bia?owie?a Puszcza contain Europe's last remaining fragment of old-growth, lowland wilderness.

We do not forget the humane attitude of the Soviet Union who was the only one among the big powers to open her doors to hundreds of thousands of Jews when the Nazi armies were advancing in Poland.

The number of ethnic Poles left in Ukraine is tiny, and Poland has no leverage over Ukrainian affairs. Whereas Khmelnytsky tried to play off Muscovy against the Poles, today's Ukraine balances Russia against America.

Ukraine might be an economic joke, a place to make cracks about, but it is also a vital buffer-state. With Ukraine independent, the Russian border stays 600 miles to the east and Poland can convincingly call itself part of Central, not Eastern, Europe. Were Ukraine – or more likely Belarus – to lose its independence, Russia would be back glowering over the frontier wire, and Europe's centre of gravity would shift away westwards.

Poland was the first country to give Ukraine diplomatic recognition, the day after the independence referendum of 1 December 1991.

Poles ended up looking so oriental, in fact, that at the battle of Vienna in 1683 Jan Sobieski had to order his troops to wear straw cockades so as to distinguish them from the enemy Turks. With serfdom and Sarmatism

Moreover, until very recently Ukraine's neighbours did not see it as a separate country, or Ukrainians as a separate people, at all. To Russians it was part of Russia; to Poles, part of Poland.

That the relationship would end in acrimony was not a foregone conclusion, for the Poland that Ukraine joined with Iogaila's marriage to Jadwiga was a country ahead of its time.

Ukraine's relationship with Poland is difficult and contradictory. For 500 years they shared a common history, first under the Polish kings, then under the Russian tsars. But like rival siblings they define themselves more by their differences than their similarities – Poland glamorous and self-dramatising;

UKRAINA is literally translated as 'on the edge' or 'borderland', and that is exactly what it is. Flat, fertile and fatally tempting to invaders, Ukraine was split between Russia and Poland from the mid seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth, between Russia and Austria through the nineteenth, and between Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania between the two world wars. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it had never been an independent state.

Though the looting fever eventually subsided in Poland and elsewhere, it may well have helped build tolerance for the corruption and theft of public property that were so common later on.

One has to work on the Polish economy, so that we start getting closer to real prosperity and not prosperity on paper.

Poland should be strong and prosperous and independent and play its proper role as a great nation in the heart of Europe.

So I think that I can say, as the President of Poland, we're proud that I am coming from Poland, which is different and what's more important, much better than before.

England had declared war to defend the independence of Poland. Now that country had quite disappeared and the two strongest states in the world guaranteed her extinction.

raging across Europe. Every night, families sat glued to the radio, listening to the news of Poland. Most still had relatives

I was named after my Jewish grandfather who left Poland early in the 20th century. What I knew from an early age was that he had lived most of his life in England, his Jewish wife had died, and he married a non-Jewish woman who was my grandmother.

I still have five years to the end of my term. There are many candidates. There'll be a problem if it's supposed to be a European or someone from the emerging countries, the so-called BRICS. This will be decided, but please don't think Poland has anything to say about it.

the Polish people be allowed to have a voice in the kind of govt. they want. Under the Yalta Pact the Soviets agreed they & others would be allowed to do this. The Soviets have never honored that promise.

I was born in Poland. In Lodz. I always knew I wanted to be a doctor. But a Jew couldn't study medicine in Poland.

You've never known what it is to live in the diaspora, in a country like Poland where you're hated for one crime—being a Jew.

It's wonderful that Poland is free again and there's open debate and people can pursue their interests. I'm all for it.

Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.

Nevertheless, in the theatre, and in the cinema, the contemporary reality of Poland has been represented only to a minuscule degree in the last 12 years.