Quotes About Eastern Europe

“In Eastern Europe, we are suspicious of the 'h' and the 'j.' The 'h,' when it is small, looks like a chair. Is it an electric chair? We don't know. Is it a regular chair sitting on a trap door? Again, we don't know. When it's big, the 'H' is always dangerous. If you pass under it, maybe the bar will fall on you. If you go over it, possibly the bar will shoot up when you're halfway across. And the 'j,' whether big or small, is always a hook. In Eastern Europe, we don't get caught.”

— James Marshall

“If the US is a human melting pot, then Eastern Europe is a scrap yard.”

— Péter Zilahy

“Because six billion of us are pursuing an evolutionarily unstable strategy, we're fundamentally attacking the very ecological systems that keep us alive. Just like the goat that refuses to suckle its kids, we're in the process of eliminating ourselves. Think about the time line Charles drew in his talk about the boiling frog. For the first six thousand years, the impact of our evolutionarily unstable strategy was minimal and confined to the Near East. Over the next two thousand years, the strategy spread to Eastern Europe and the Far East. In the next fifteen hundred years, the strategy spread throughout the Old World. In the next three hundred years, it became global. By the end of the next two hundred years-which is now-so many people were following the strategy that the impact was becoming catastrophic. We're now about two generations away from finishing the job of making this unstable strategy extinct.”

— Daniel Quinn

“But I knew that we had really met, she the Catholic from Eastern Europe, I the Protestant from the West. There on the crowded tramway platform we had met as Christians.”

— Brother Andrew

“From its earliest days in the nineteenth century, and until the Holocaust, the Orthodox rabbinate in eastern Europe was not enthusiastic about the Zionist movement, which at the time was led by irreligious Jews.”

— Elliott Abrams

“Overcoming the Cold War required courage from the people of Central and Eastern Europe and what was then the German Democratic Republic, but it also required the steadfastness of Western partner over many decades when many had long lost hope of integration of the two Germanys and Europe.”

— Angela Merkel

“The trouble with the Labour Party leadership and the trade union leadership, they're quite willing to applaud millions on the streets of the Philippines or in Eastern Europe, without understanding the need to also produce millions of people on the streets of Britain.”

— Arthur Scargill

“More than forty years of Communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe resulted in an unhappy and artificial division of Europe. It is this dark chapter of European history that we now have the opportunity to close.”

— Anders Fogh Rasmussen

“Some countries that are close to Europe that already hold Deutschemarks, clearly would automatically hold euros, those are countries in Eastern Europe mainly, a few countries in Africa.”

— Robert C. Solomon

“Well, I think he's right to notice that there is a difference in attitudes and even in the broadest sense of world view between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. Which is old and which is new is an interesting question, and I almost think that maybe he's got it backwards.”

— Robert Kagan

“I've worked behind counters serving food, and I've lived on the circus train, and I've led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia. I've been a key liner for a newspaper, I've done typesetting. Oh, all sorts of things.”

— Bonnie Jo Campbell

“Kosovo today is closer to Europe than other countries in the region of South Eastern Europe.”

— Ibrahim Rugova

“There's no question that Stalin broke the agreements made at Yalta completely about elections that were supposed to be held immediately in Poland, and Eastern Europe was plunged into slavery as a consequence.”

— Mark Shields

“We should never forget that Hollywood was built by Europeans, and the old Jewish boys from Eastern Europe.”

— Maximilian Schell

“Socialism is undoubtedly in the throes of a crisis greater than at any time since 1917. The last half of 1989 saw the dramatic collapse of most of the communist party governments of Eastern Europe.”

— Joe Slovo

“I would eventually leave the business in 1999 to work full-time as a writer, but during the previous decade, I would advise French businessmen on how to succeed in Germany; tell Americans what to do in Eastern Europe; show the Spanish how to become more like the Americans. I spent one particularly haunting year advising bankers in Mexico.”

— Matthew Stewart

“In terms of the Eastern Europe stories, my family is originally from there; even as a kid, it was the Russian writers I loved most, and I've spent a substantial amount of time there myself, traveling and on research grants.”

— Molly Antopol

“And my heart beat faster for the mountains of eastern Europe, finally, beat faster for the one hope that somewhere we might find in that primitive countryside the answer to why under God this suffering was allowed to exist - why under God it was allowed to begin, and how under God it might be ended. I had not the courage to end it, I knew, without that answer.”

— Anne Rice

“We have a Conservative leader that believes in green taxes, that won't bring back grammar schools, that believes in continuing with total open-door migration from eastern Europe and refuses to give us a referendum on the EU.”

— Nigel Farage

“I've always held the view that great states need strategic space. I mean, George Washington took his space from George III. Britain took it from just about everybody. Russia took all of Eastern Europe. Germany's taken it from everywhere they can, and China will want its space too.”

— Paul Keating

“I've never lived in Eastern Europe, although both my wife and I have ancestors in Poland and Russia - but I can see the scenes I create.”

— Alan Furst

“Romania, which had the worst dictator in Eastern Europe, Ceausescu, he was a darling of the West. The United States and Britain loved him. He was supported until the last minute.”

— Noam Chomsky

“In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri - where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.”

— Barack Obama

“Romania can be a linchpin in delivering gas to its neighbors and even become an energy exporter for its neighbors across Central and Eastern Europe.”

— Joe Biden

“I was doing an investigative article on arms trafficking that was taking me through Eastern Europe and the Middle East. And after I had interviewed a helicopter pilot who had been ferrying weapons into Liberia, I realized as I left the restaurant that I was being followed and set up for an ambush.”

— Peter Landesman

“Building up the arms did not cause the fall of Eastern Europe.”

— Michael Moore

“I am fully aware of the concept of political revolutions. After all, that is what we hoped might happen in the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe, but what actually happened was capitalist restoration.”

— Tariq Ali

“China is investing in factories in Eastern Europe, not because their labor costs are lower, but because they want to be closer to their markets.”

— Michael Bloomberg

“A lot of heavyweights, with the exception of a few Eastern Europe fighters, they really look like being a heavyweight is just like, who can eat the most Pizza Hut and McDonalds.”

— Randy Johnson

“There is an elaborate North African mezuzah case that dates to sometime in the 1700s, and by the nineteenth century Jews in Russia, eastern Europe, and Morocco were shaping mezuzah cases out of silver, creating miniature arks and fish and other pretty symbols in which to house their slices of parchment.”

— Lauren F. Winner

“As I wrote Working toward Whiteness, I came to see one historic task on the New Deal - and one in which it succeeded - as the fostering of fuller U.S. citizenship among immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and their kids. But this very achievement separated poorer and often despised immigrant workers from Europe and workers of color in unprecedented ways.”

— David Roediger

“During my campaign, I had come across a small number of (mostly) young men, who had strongly racist views. They told me they would only vote for a party that was willing to get rid of black and coloured people from this country. What struck me as strange is that they weren't bothered about the thousands of white Europeans arriving from Central and Eastern Europe.”

— Andrea Leadsom

“Vladimir Putin is a Russian czar. He's kind of a mix of Peter the Great and Stalin. He's got both in his veins. And he looks out first and foremost for the national security interests of Russia. He accepts that, in Eastern Europe, that is a Russian backyard, that is a Russian sphere of influence. Ukraine lives most uncomfortably and unhappily in a Russian backyard.”

— Marvin Kalb

“Well the most likely emerging countries are Japan, Turkey, and Poland. So I would say Eastern Europe, the Middle East and a maritime war by Japan with the United States enjoying its own pleasures.”

— George Friedman

“As one looks back, one sees that the fall of the Berlin Wall opened the door to three developments - the Eurozone, which was crafted around German unification, the free movement of peoples within Europe, particularly people from the new democracies of Eastern Europe, and, more broadly, it opened the door to globalization.”

— Timothy Garton Ash

“I'm a historian by training and by conviction. And so the thing that has throughout informed my thinking about international relations is history. I think, for example, the reason that I was perhaps able to see sooner than some others that the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe was decaying
if not disintegrating
was that I came to it through history and through Germany, rather than through Sovietology and through Moscow. And therefore the starting point was that no empire in history has lasted forever, and this one won't either.”

— Timothy Garton Ash

“The route for the refugees currently goes through Greece and the Balkans or through Italy; if there were a crisis in north-eastern Europe, Poland might just as well be affected. In this case we are dealing with mechanisms that we do not control. We need to change that.”

— Paolo Gentiloni

“Tobacco control is clearly a number one priority in Europe, not only aimed at men, particularly the male populations of Central and Eastern Europe, but increasingly targeted towards women, especially in Northern Europe.”

— Peter Boyle

“I'd been keeping tour diaries, and especially when I go somewhere where I felt the experience might be interesting, like Eastern Europe or South America or whatever, where the whole perception of what I was doing there and stuff that I was seeing and music I was hearing, I could put all that into a diary.”

— David Byrne

“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

— Ronald Reagan

“One by one, these governments came undone, and were forced into IMF tutelage (and national illegitimacy) by the careening oil prices, the debt imbroglio, and falling terms of trade. The last of these governments to fall were the Communist regimes of eastern Europe, which have now gone the way of other Third World countries. The second in the cascade of bifurcations is thus symbolized by 1989.”

— Immanuel Wallerstein

“To persuade thinking persons in Eastern Europe that Central American Marxists - the Sandinistas, the guerillas in El Salvador - are in absurd and tragic error is not difficult. Poles and Czechs and Hungarians can hardly believe, after what they experienced under socialism, that other human beings would fall for the same bundle of lies, half-truths, and distortions. Sadly, however, illusion is often sweeter to human taste than reality. The last marxist in the world will probably be an American nun.”

— Michael Novak

“History has often showed us the strength of the forces that are unleashed by the yearning for freedom. It moved people to overcome their fears and openly confront dictators such as in East Germany and Eastern Europe about 22 years ago. [ ... ] The yearning for freedom cannot be contained by walls for long. It was this yearning that brought down the Iron Curtain that divided Germany and Europe, and indeed the world, into two blocs.”

— Angela Merkel

“As we all learned from the sorry experience of state-sanctioned bureaucracies in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, decentralization [in education] is crucial to both freedom and excellence.”

— Jerry Brown

“For the Russians, frankly, it's time that we punched the Russians in the nose. They've gotten away with too much in this world and we need to stand up against them, not just there, but also in Eastern Europe where they threaten some of our most precious allies.”

— John Kasich

“We will stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power. We will stop that nuclear arms race that could happen in the Middle East. We will also make that Putin knows we have brigades in eastern Europe to make sure we deter his aggression. Peace through strength works.”

— Bobby Jindal

“Italy spills over to everything. Italy is a huge banking system. It has been the major banking system in Eastern Europe. It's worked with Austria's banking system. There's all sorts of interplays there. So it's not the PIIGS one should worry about. Germany hasn't even begun falling yet. And when Germany falls, and it will, that's when the panic begins to set in.”

— George Friedman

“Should the German people lay down their arms, the Soviets ... would occupy all eastern and south-eastern Europe, together with the greater part of the [German] Reich. All over this territory, which would be of an enormous extent, an iron curtain would at once descend.”

— Joseph Goebbels

“EU didn't advance our [Eastern Europe] democracy by a single millimeter.”

— Vaclav Klaus

“In light of 50 years of bondage of Eastern Europe, [invading the Soviet Union in 1948 to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons] was probably a reasonable thing to do.”

— Condoleezza Rice